Cisco interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - Intern

Cisco
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4 rounds | 5 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 1 Month
Topics: Data Structures, OOPS, Pointers, Machine learning , Dynamic programming
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Practice coding questions of each difficulty level in the ratio of 3:2:1 (easy:medium:hard)
Tip 2 : Make sure that you have thorough knowledge of your projects/internships

Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: Above 7.5 CGPA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Update your resume to highlight your strengths
Tip 2 : Remove unnecessary courses in which you aren’t confident

Interview rounds

01
Round
Medium
Online Coding Interview
Duration90 Minutes
Interview date19 Feb 2019
Coding problem0

50 MCQS with Coding outputs, digital design, probability, OS and DBMS.

02
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration45 Minutes
Interview date19 Feb 2019
Coding problem1

The interviewer was nice and he made me feel comfortable 
Topics :- Data structures, string manipulation and pointers
Timing :- Afternoon

1. Remove Duplicates From String

Moderate
25m average time
0/80
Asked in companies
SamsungAccentureLivekeeping (An IndiaMART Company)

You are given a string (STR) of length N, consisting of only the lower case English alphabet.

Your task is to remove all the duplicate occurrences of characters in the string.

For Example:
If the given string is:
abcadeecfb

Then after deleting all duplicate occurrences, the string looks like this:
abcdef
Problem approach

I used a dictionary in python to count the occurrences of each letter in the word. I then used the keys of this dictionary to return the answer

Try solving now
03
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 Minutes
Interview date19 Feb 2019
Coding problem2

The interviewer was very supportive and we had a good discussion regarding his role in cisco etc.
Questions on various topics were asked including my courses, resume and internship

1. Tree Traversals

Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
Wells FargoCognizantBig Basket

You have been given a Binary Tree of 'N'

nodes, where the nodes have integer values.


Your task is to return the ln-Order, Pre-Order, and Post-Order traversals of the given binary tree.


For example :
For the given binary tree:

Binary - Tree1

The Inorder traversal will be [5, 3, 2, 1, 7, 4, 6].
The Preorder traversal will be [1, 3, 5, 2, 4, 7, 6].
The Postorder traversal will be [5, 2, 3, 7, 6, 4, 1].
Problem approach

I calmly understood the question and applied the correct tree traversal logic while handling the corner cases

Try solving now

2. Technical Question

This was a Machine learning problem. I was given a scenario where I had a dataset of many users with their likes and dislikes for many movies. Now given a user with some information about his movie preferences, I had to built a ML model which can suggest a movie to the user from the database. In other words, my ML model should be able to predict the likes/dislikes of that particular user for the entire movie database

Problem approach

I used the concept of transfer learning where I first trained a deep neural network on the entire movie and user dataset. Then I used this model and froze some initial and final layers of my neural network and trained my network again according to the limited data provided for that user’s movie preferences.

04
Round
Medium
HR Round
Duration30 Minutes
Interview date20 Feb 2019
Coding problem2

It was the HR round

1. Basic HR Question

I was asked to describe my strengths and weaknesses

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Explain your strength first
Tip 2 : Relate your weakness and strength attributes 
Tip 3 : Explain the steps you are taking to improve on both

2. Basic HR Question

What has changed in me since I joined college?

Problem approach

Tip 1 : Be true to yourself and explain your journey year wise
Tip 2 : Provide a significant incident which further justifies your point.

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

Skill covered: Programming

To make an AI less repetitive in a long paragraph, you should increase:

Choose another skill to practice
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