Cisco Interview Experience | On-Campus Virtual Hiring for Internship 2020-21

Cisco visited our campus recently to offer a 2-month internship for the upcoming summer of 2021. All processes are done virtually.

Round 1 (Online Round – 60 minutes):

The first round basically comprised of 2 coding questions and 15 MCQ’s. The total time was 60 minutes. The test was conducted on Hackerrank.

Coding Questions:

The languages allowed for this round were C/JAVA/Python. C++ was not allowed. Therefore, at least be comfortable with at least one more language other than CPP language.

1. You were given a list of strings which indicated at what time of the day an employee of a company checked in and checked out of the company on a particular day.  Input was in the form of <Employee_Name>, <In_Time>, <Out_Time> (comma separated). The time was always in HH:MM:SS 24-hours format. And also you were given a time of the day as query <Query_Time>. You have to determine how many numbers of employees were present inside the company at the point in time (Query_Time).

Input:    

Alice,10:23:02,13:04:45

Bob,09:00:43,12:03:21

11:00:56

Output:

Number of employees present in the office at the point of time.

Explanation:

In these examples, o/p will be 2 (Reason: Alice and Bob both are inside the office at time 11:00:56).

2. You were given a 3×3 matrix consisting of numbers between 1- 9. Finally, you have to arrange the matrix in the following format,

1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

In the given input matrix, only the following operations were allowed to convert the matrix to the final matrix.

Operation: You can exchange two adjacent numbers only if their sum is a prime number.

Now you have to find the minimum number of exchanges needed to reach the final(goal) matrix.

MCQ’s: MCQ’s consisted of Aptitude, OS, Output based questions among other theoretical questions.

Tips: The trick to passing the round is to focus on solving the easy coding question first and then complete as many MCQs as possible. Then after completing the MCQs move to the difficult coding question.

NOTE:

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all other rounds of interviews were happened virtually conducted on Cisco Teams. The coding question was solved by sharing the screen with the interviewer by using CISCO whiteboard or any other editor can also be used (like Notepad++/VisualStudio etc.)

Round 2 (Technical Round – 45 to 50 minutes):

This round started with a brief introduction about myself and then the discussion goes to my technical stuff by asking questions about OOPs, OS, DBMS, CPP.

Some coding questions which were asked are,

• Diamond Problem,  

• Linked List implementation(insertion, deletion, traversing),  

• Stack(implementation),  

• Conversion of Queue to Stack,  

• Detect and remove the loop in a linked list,

• Some general SQL queries.

In some question’s code are required and in some question’s approach/idea is sufficient.

After that interviewer asked me if I had any questions for which I asked 1 question about the company atmosphere which went for 4-5 min. And then the round was over.

Tips: Be very clear with the basics, that is the most important thing. If you make mistakes in a hared questions then it’s fine but if you miss the basics then it does not look good and creates a negative impact in front of the interviewer.

Round 3 (Managerial Round – 35 to 40 minutes):

This round starts with some of my resume points like my technical and non-technical skills. After that, the interviewer moved on to the basics of OS, DBMS, CPP. Some questions are slightly similar to the previous round.  

The key questions which a liked by this round are,

• Dynamic Casting,

• 0 – 1 sorting question with different approaches,  

• Program to get the PID of any running process with a LINUX system,

• Different kinds of Scheduling and how to convert one process scheduling method to others,

• Why you want to be a part of CISCO? And what is your job role?

Then he asked me if I have any questions, so I asked 1-2 questions and this discussion goes for 7-8 min. And then this round was also over.

Tips: Be enthusiastic about your area of interest and be prepared with the basics. This helps a lot during the interview. Sometimes some interviewers do expect a few implementation details. One should be through with the job role before coming for the interview.

Round 3 (HR Round – 12 to 15 minutes):

This round was a short and informative round. HR’s first question was “Tell me about yourself.”. After that, we have a short discussion on my project and the challenges which I faced during the making of the project. Then there are some questions like ‘In which field you are interested(like the job role)?’, ‘What is the stipend?’, ‘Which is your preferred city?’, and other responses required for the job. Then he asked me to ask any doubt or question. After which all rounds were over.

Tips: Be truthful and clear while conveying your ideas and be confident. Your confidence will be reflected only-in how you communicate. Have a good knowledge of the company for which you are applying. Also, one should know each and every point/word/buzz used in their resume. The interviewer can ask any point mentioned in the resume. That’s all from my side prepare well and Best of Luck.