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.
I applied in-person. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco (Bengaluru) in Oct 2010
Interview
For screening they conduct a written test 50 Questions in total, 20 Aptitude types and 30 Engineering.
In this 30 Questions 60% Electronics, and 40% in CS.
After that 3 F2F Technical Interviews and 1 HR Interview.
They will ask about your Projects.
C,(In Depth)
Data Structure(Mainly Trees and Linked List)
Algorithm(Basic)
OS(Baiscs More than Average.)
Networking (Basics College Level)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Where is string constants stored in Memory?
Ex: char * a = "Hello" ;