I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco in Sep 2011
Interview
The recruiter was really nice and he just asked a puzzle. Given 8 balls, 7 of them is 10g and the 8th one is .9g, you can use a balance scale, how can you find the lighter ball if you can use the balance scale only two times. I think the puzzle is very common. But I have not solved it during the interview. Sorry about that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the only lighter ball from 8 balls using a balance scale only two times.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (Milpitas, CA) in Oct 2009
Interview
Cisco Recruiter called me that she is trying to fill a position for past several months and she thinks my profile on LinkedIn is perfect fit. I ask her to send job description. When she did and I reviewed, I said it is not perfect fit. She said, it is match - she suggested me to speak to Tech Leader. I spoke to Tech Leader and he did a phone screen as well. Then, after a week or so, I went for an in-person interview with 4 engineers... for about 4 hrs. Then, after another week, there was another in-person interview with 2 more engineers, 2 directors. Then, they made me an offer - negotiation, reference checks etc took another 2 weeks.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you design a thread pool in Java?
Why do you need threads?
How do you detect stale db connections?
Can you do code review of this class from my code? (Interviewer shared code)
Design for several readers reading from queue and several writers writing into it
Details on how a web-app is developed
What happens end to end when user types a URL to view books on Amazon.com
Singleton - how to write for delayed instantiation but also thread safety
I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Cisco in Jan 2009
Interview
Had phone interview first where basic questions related to background wer asked. After that I was called for 1:1 interviews. There were 6 interviews ~30 mins each. Some were technical & some were more personality tests. Got an offer within a week. Salary was negotiable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
None of the questions asked were difficult or unexpcted.