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Updated May 14, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
Ratings are reflective of location and job title.

Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 19 ratings

3.2

“Average” Interview

Interview Experience [?] Based on 19 ratings

Positive	68%
Neutral	21%
Negative	11%

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4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Feb 2010 in Bangalore (India) (took 3 days)

It was a good experience over all . They where testing the will to learn and how good you are in interacting with others.

Interview Questions

Tell me about your self?

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Presentation and a Skills Test.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

it was a campus recruitment. my interviewer was cool, gives you time to think, so don't be tensed.

Interview Questions

How do you rotate a 8-bit integer?

Answer Question

What is kernel/user mode

Answer Question

Other Details

The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

Interview was nice they mainly focused on the content posted in the resume and asked questions based on the same.

Interview Questions

Design a charging circuit?

Answer Question

How to detect repeated nodes in linked list

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Dec 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

They had 3 rounds of personal interviews once I cleared the written test. First interview was totally based on computer Networks. He asked me some basic concepts of Networking. Second interview was based on my CV. He asked me few questions on data structures, about my projects etc. and the third was the HR interview and the main questions were why cisco? and would you like to go for masters or not??

Interview Questions

HR question: your academic skills are excellent. Why don't you go for masters?? I would suggest you to go for masters!

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Jan 2010 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

The interview consisted of a written test followed by 3-4 rounds of personal interviews both technical and HR. Technical interviews were decent and usual as done by other companies in the software field. They tested us mostly on basics and put questions based on the projects we had written in the CV.

Interview Questions

Where do you see yourself after 5/10 years?

View Answers (1)

Other Details

I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test and a Personality Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

They conducted a written test followed by intvw.In the first round they checked my programming skills and interviewer focused on C,Data structures and Unix as well as networks.It went for 1.30 min and then 2nd round was also tough(1hr).Finally manager talked to me to finalize the things.

Interview Questions

Write a C program to Replace a particular word in a file ?

Answer Question

3 way handshaking?

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a Staffing Agency and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

4.0

Difficult Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Mar 2012 in Bangalore (India) (took 2+ weeks)

Following rounds took place :

1. Telephonic : Introduction to job desicription and employee introduction. - 20 min
2. Telephonic : Technical screeing : Questions were very basic but you need to have in depth knowldege-2hr
3. Face to Face : Technical - Asked to choose one topic and then had 15-30 min of tough questions on that one.
4. Presentation : Got a 24 page technical documentation to read within less than 45 min. I Didn't read all the pages. Then had a Video Conferencing with a panel and gave them the presentation where they put in a lot of questions. - 30-40 min
5. Technical : Had a Technical round on Video Confrencing with a panel . 10 -20 min
6. Manager Round . Had Video Conferecing with a Manager. Had some operational question , Personality questions and some managerial questions. 40-50 min
7. HR Round : Discussion with HR on Compensation and Other benifits : 15 min.

Then recieved the offer after 7-8 Working days.

Interview Questions

I was asked to troubleshoot a given MGCP senario on a note book.

View Answers (1)

Negotiation Details

There was very less or infact no scope of negotiation . Compensation offered was good enough.

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Presentation, a Skills Test, a Personality Test and a Background Check.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Neutral Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jun 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

it was through an employee's referal

Interview Questions

Started with the question of how does traffic moves when we ping from one host to another

Answer Question

osi model,nating, acl

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.

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Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Negative Experience

Interviewed and No Offer

Interviewed Jan 2012 in Bangalore (India) (took 2 weeks)

Got a call from hiring manager. It was a very good call where we spoke about our experience and expectations. A few video confs (VCs) were set up for next day, for which I had to go to an office that had Cisco Telepresence facility. These talks went went really well but a couple of discussions were 30-45 mins each which I thought was too short to judge anybody. Anyways, Interviews were technical (duh :-)) and one of the interviewers wondered that I being a senior, if I remembered data structures and algorithms! I asked him to find out and he asked me a few problems on BSTs and linked lists.

A few more discussions were set up for the next day as well during the middle of the day (had to agree to this odd hour on hiring manager's request as conf room was all booked otherwise). As I got ready to leave my office at around noon for the interviews I happened to check my mail and saw that interviews were cancelled! Staffing coordinator sent a mail in the morning saying that interviews have been cancelled. Lucky me! Thank goodness I checked my mail else I would have wasted couple of hours in horrible traffic. Now, I would expect such important information to have been conveyed through phone. I expressed my concern about this to hr and I was told that they tried calling me 3 times but i didn't answer! Seriously, they want to believe this, especially when my phone was with me since morning and it didn't ring once and also, no missed calls. Tricks that hr plays :-( (more below about this)

Anyway, these VCs were rescheduled and they went really well. Later they called me f2f to Bangalore, and I was told that i have to purchase flight tickets and file for reimbursement later. I would have rather hr make travel arrangements and not worry about reimbursement as it could be a hassle, which I discovered later. Anyway, flew to B'lore and had a great day of very good quality technical interviews. People treated me with respect and quality of interviews were also good. Couple of interviews I really enjoyed as they talked about multiple problems on algorithms and I love algorithms :-)

After I returned from b'lore, I had one more VC which went well but the panel thought there was misalignment of experience with expectations. But I really liked their honesty and quick feedback.

Coming back to hr and poor candidate experience, they have left no stone unturned to make sure that i have a negative experience, undoing all the good work of engineering team who took such great interviews. I was expected to send hard copies of all the bills and boarding passes by snail mail to cisco bangalore for getting reimbursement!! Starting thinking about why did I accept to make my own travel arrangements and go through this suffering and pain. Even a govt office in india accepts scanned copies but not a technology company that revolutionized internet :-) Also, I have interviewed with a few more companies in b'lore recently but none of them asked for boarding passes - soft copy of invoice was enough. Needless to say, I had only one boarding pass with me and the other one i had misplaced/lost. I called the staffing coordinator to discuss about cutting out this inane process but was cut short immediately and told that there is nothing to discuss and everything would be done as per the email that was sent to me earlier about reimbursement process. My goodness, this was just like the scripted reply you get when you call a customer call center when your washing machine goes bad :-) When I protested, she said she is busy and will call back later. Needless to say, that never happened and I sent email inquiry to her (whose name i am tempted to take for all the humiliation i had to suffer but I'll resist) but no response for 3 days. I shudder to think that if a person with 17 years of experience who interviewed for a very senior position is treated with such disregard by hiring staff, what about the junior folks? A great company like Cisco is surely being maligned by such (ill)actions.

I am going to give this interview experience a negative, despite great technical interviews and respect I got from engineering staff, just because of immature and insensitive recruiters who don't understand that a) its their full time job, b) they represent the company brand. Sincere apologies to the hiring manager.

Interview Questions

How do you search a number in a nxn matrix where numbers are always increasing in magnitude, both from left to right and top to bottom.

Answer Question

Other Details

I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.

Helpful Interview?

Yes | No

Inappropriate?

3.0

Average Interview

Overall Positive Experience

Received and Accepted Offer

Interviewed Nov 2011 in Bangalore (India) (took a day)

It was an exhaustive process. 5 rounds.
All the rounds were equally detailed against my expectations.
I was expecting subsequent rounds to become tougher but it didn't happen.

Round-1: Panel had 2 people (Sr.Engineer/Lead I guess)

Interview consisted of basic C questions like:
- Write a prototype for String concat function
- Implement the above prototype.
  There were cross questions like what should be the return type (status code SUCCESS/FAIL)
  Input string should be const* or not.
  Should the input also contain a length field to take care of non-NULL terminated strings?
  Who will take care of malloc/free (caller or the implementation).
  What things u'll have to take care if u make this function compile as a library - re-entrancy etc.

- Second question was related to link list operations.
  It was a puzzle popularly known as the link list Y problem. You can google for it.
  Questions were raised on complexity of the algo and the best solution possible.
  I was not asked to write any code for this.

- Implementation of Binary tree
- implementation of circular linked list and then writing a program to add a new node at the end and delete the existing last one.
- 8 queen problem on a chess board
- priority inversion
- what are priority queues
- write a program to generate combinations of a given set of characters
- use of volatile type qualifier
- how does windows socket communication work in single server multiple client and single thred system
- difference between semaphore and mutex
- count number of 1 in a int
- how to multiply a number by 7 without using multipilcation and and addition
- how is negative number represented in C
- how to detect loop in linked list
- how to delete current node in the linked list when previous node is not known
- how to find middle of the linked list
- AVL trees
- strcmp function ( optimized implementation, hint: using checksum )
- 8 ball given find the odd ball in 3 tries (odd ball can be heavy or light )
- OS implemetation of mutex and semaphore
-

- Then they asked a puzzle..which was quite easy to crack..They also asked me to ask them a puzzle :) and I did that.

Overall the round was very open...interviewers were very friendly and I never felt any stress.

Round-2: 1 guy. Senior Manager.

Asked me in detail about my current project.
--He was interested more on the network side of IMS. , So I went into the details of CSCFs.
--He specifically grilled me a lot on how an IP packet is routed in IMS network (UE to PCSCF--ICSCF--SCSCF)...and was finally convinced.
But was a very friendly guy and kept me at ease.

Round-3: 1 guy. Senior Manager.
Very cool and friendly guy.
Tried to understand how routing in IMS works ?
Then asked me IP related questions.
How IP routing works ? Subnetting ? How Ping works ?
DNS, ICMP, ARP, DHCP, etc ?

Round-4: 1 guy. Senior Manager.
Asked me if I had written a "sufficiently big" C program in previous round ?
Made me implement a binary tree. Source code went up to 4-5 white sheets.
Asked few cross questions on the code and corrected me where he felt I was wrong.

Round-5: 1 guy. Senior Manager.
Asked me to explain how all layers of protocol stack work and which network entities are involved - starting from the moment you type a URL in web browser till the time the page is displayed.

Then asked me lot of non-technical questions like "what makes a good manager"? What are good qualities of a team player ?
How do u think u'll manage work life balance here under high work load etc etc...
Basically he wanted to study my temperament..as there are no definite answers to these questions :)