I have applied for the Cisco Off-Campus drive on Jan-03-2022. After 4 days I received a mail containing a link for the assessment. The assessment took place in Hackerrank platform consisting of GATE level questions from Computer subjects including “OS, DBMS, and Computer Networks” and some find the output questions and two coding questions to solve. One question is called expressive words and the other one is called something like “Mango”. Expressive word is an easy question. Anyone with good knowledge of string manipulation can do that. but the second question is hard. You need to know about Graph and Backtracking algorithms to do it. I have successfully cleared the first round.
Two days later, I received a mail saying that there will be another coding round which is not an elimination round but you will be discussing your solution to that problem during the interview. The problem I got in this round is known as “Keypad Fun”. You will have 30minutes time to complete this problem and again it took place in Hackerrank.
After that interviews were scheduled for Jan-19. There is a space created in Webex and all the interviewers and candidates will be added. For this drive, there were around 120 members in that space of which 15-20 were from the cisco hiring team. The interview rounds were started at 8:00 in the morning and lasted up to 8:00 at night. You need to wait patiently for your call. the HR will inform your timings of the interview. But the interview might not be at the mentioned time. Sometimes you have to wait until the interviewer gets a slot.
The interview consists of three rounds.
- Round 1: In round 1, there were two-panel members, they started with tell me about yourself and asked everything from our resumes. They also asked some in-depth questions about communication networks, Operating systems, and Computer Architecture. After answering those, they asked me the solution of “Keypad Fun” and told me to find the corner cases. I took some to come up with the corner cases but the interviewer helped me there. After that, he came up with the problem “Create a queue using stacks”. First I gave him the wrong approach but the interview told him that we can have any number of stacks. After that, I gave him an exact approach to creating a queue using two stacks. Round 1 was over there. I am not too confident in this round because I felt that I could have done better. This round took place for 1 hour.
- Round 2: After a couple of hours, I got a call for round 2. It was with a manager. He straight away asked questions from my resume and about my projects. I quickly answered those. Then we discussed the “Keypad Fun” problem. He said “Your approach looks right” and asked, “why you are not getting the correct output”. I replied that I don’t have sufficient time to solve the problem. After this discussion, he gave me a problem statement and code it in my code editor. This problem is the Clockwise rotation of an array for n time. This is a general problem. I came up with the best solution in the first go itself. The best solution is like reversing the array three times. I dry ran the code and he was ok with it. This round took only 20 minutes and I was confident that I will be selected for the next round.
- Round 3: It was the last round with the HR. She asked about the higher studies plan, location preference, and compensations offered. It took only minutes- kind of a rapid question answers round.
After every round is over, I just went through the entire Webex space to collect the number of persons who got the third call. It was 28 including me. After a week, I got a mail from Cisco HR that I was Rejected. Still, I’m happy for going that far competing with candidates of top-tier colleges. I’m from a tier-3 college. I guess that might be one of the reasons I got rejected for.