Cisco Interview Experience SDE-1

My placement experience was a roller coaster of emotions. At one point, I felt very confident, and at others, I had no self-esteem and was terrified. I started to practice coding for interviews on Interviewbit during the summer vacation during my internship days because I had no prior experience in competitive programming. However, due to a tight schedule, I couldn’t keep up with it. Eventually, after the start of my 7th semester in July’19, I began full-fledged competitive coding practice.

For the initial two months, only Interviewbit and w3wiki were the websites that I referred to for coding.

There are a total of 5 rounds of interviews

• 3 technical round
• 1 managerial round
• 1 HR round

It was bit tough/confusing. He said that he won’t check our coding skills as we had already passed the test round. So he started with computer networking question. Since I didn’t study computer networks till then so i told him that i don’t know about computer networking. Then he asked me whether I know cloud computing technologies or not? Again i answered no. So he started asking me questions from OS To my luck he mainly asked from memory management and Process management (CPU scheduling) on which i was very confident.

Most of the initial questions were based upon different scheduling algorithms (Ravindrabu Ravula’s lectures answered those) and in memory management, the basic definitions etc. Then application-based questions came where he asked me to explain different aspects like virtual memory etc in a real-life example which he gave me. Only identifying the aspect was important. Then he started asking OOPS questions.

• He gave me some code fragments and asked whether those codes will work for desired output or not.
• Upcasting, abstract class, virtual functions etc were mainly included in concepts.( OOPS from study tonight and questions from gfg helped). My OOPS concepts were good so I did well in first round.

Next round was technical again. It was of 25 mins duration and taken by Senior Engineer from CISCO.

He asked a coding question at first which was somewhat similar scenario as

• https://www.w3wiki.net/optimal-strategy-for-a-game-set-2/

I’ve seen this before so I know the answer. But he wanted me to optimize, which I didn’t know. He helped a little with that. Then came another question from him similar to aggressive cows question. This time I had some trouble understanding the question but it was not difficult.

It went on for over an hour. I thought this was HR round. But this was CV scrutiny round (He scanned my whole CV in front of me and asked questions from each and every project and experience on my CV). He was ex- Microsoft employee and he had worked on Face. In one of my projects I used Microsoft Azure Face API.Therefore he asked so many technical details on that which were very difficult for me to answer.

• Gave me a lecture on stop using ‘*’ on some technical skills.He was working on some Generative models; hence asked questions related to generative models and GANs.We had a good discussion at last about facial recognition .

1. It lasted for about 20 minutes.
2. I doubt it should have happened at all, and for someone else surely, because they wrapped it up so quickly.
3. It was just a simple general probability question and a puzzle; he anclosed them in some interesting words and ended the interview so very soon.

• Duration was around 30 mins.
• She asked mainly about my second page of cv.
• About my previous internships and my hometown .
• We had a fun conversation,I was a bit nervous and this was so relaxing.

Lastly,thanks for reading ,I hope you will prepare well for your placements….All the best for future,,,,