I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (Research Triangle Park, NC) in Feb 2016
Interview
The process began with an initial phone screen and 6 on-site interviews.
The phone interview focused on Systems. I was asked about Threads/Processes, Synchronization Primitives, Parallelization and Distributed Systems. The phone screen ended with networking concepts (VLANs and MPLS).
The on-site interviews focused on Networking, Systems and programming (C language). Each and every concept in the Operating Systems book were visited. The interviewers were very interested in knowing the design decisions I made while implementing the system level projects.
Networking related questions covered VLANs, MPLS, VPNs, ARP, STP, BGP, OSPF, VRRP, etc. The fundamental concepts behind the protocols were tested.
I was asked to write 3 programs - String based, bit manipulation and linked list based.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was time and again asked about the design decisions - Why use a concept and not the other one ? The interviewers were really interested to know whether I know the fundamental concepts.
Questions on DSA and basic Operating Systems and networking questions. Also, there was a behavioral round that covered all from my resume and gave to situations to respond accordingly. I got the interview call through GHC and it had only 2 interviews
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions on DSA and basic Operating Systems and networking questions.
I successfully completed the online assessment, demonstrating proficiency in all questions and test cases. However, there has been no communication or update on the interview process from the company since.