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

SDE - Intern

Cisco
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3 rounds | 3 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Preparation
Duration: 10 months
Topics: Data Structures and Algorithms, Object Oriented Programming, Computer Networks, DBMS, OS
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Give contests regularly (LC Contests/CF Contests/ Any other)
Tip 2 : Solve quality questions and don't spend more than 90 minutes on a single questions. Take hint and try to solve it yourself.
Tip 3 : Try to make 1/2 quality projects, might not be very complex but you should have 100% knowledge about it.

Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: Above 7 CGPA
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : Have less things on resume but have full grasp on what things are written in resume.
Tip 2 : Don't write any unnecessary things which is not relevant to job description.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Online Coding Interview
Duration70 minutes
Interview date8 Sep 2021
Coding problem2

Part -1 : MCQs
There were 15 MCQs related to Networks, Troubleshooting, DBMS and other Core CS subjects

Part-2 : Coding Questions

 

1. Circle of Words

Ninja
63m average time
25% success
0/200
Asked in companies
SamsungCiscoUrban Company (UrbanClap)

You are given an array/list of words, your task is to check whether the individual words can be rearranged to form a circle.

Two words, ‘X’ and ‘Y’, can be put together in a circle if the last character of ‘X’ is the same as the first character of ‘Y’ or vice versa.

For Example:
For the array [ “TUNA”, “TIGER”, “RABBIT”, “RAT”, “ANTEATER” ],

A possible circle can be:

Try solving now

2. Possible Words From A Phone Number

Hard
55m average time
45% success
0/120
Asked in companies
Tata 1mgSnapdealAmazon

After years of research, Ninja is finally able to invent the time machine, and now he is back to the good old days when T9 keypads were being used in mobile phones.

Being a curious person, Ninja wants to find out all possible strings that can be formed by pressing the keys of the phone.

Formally, you are given a string S, that consists of digits from 2-9 (both inclusive), your task is to find out all the possible strings that can be formed from the input string by mapping the digits to the letters as in a T9 keypad. Then, print the strings in a lexicographically sorted order.

T9_Keypad

For Example:
If S = “34”, then all the possible letters that can be formed from string S are {“dg”, “dh”, “di”, “eg”, “eh”, “ei”, “fg”, “fh”, “fi”}.
Problem approach

I solved it with help of HashMap and Set. It was an easy implementation question.

Try solving now
02
Round
Easy
Video Call
Duration85 minutes
Interview date12 Sep 2021
Coding problem0

Started with the following questions.

Tell me about your yourself (the general icebreaker).

Tell me about time when you faced a difficult challenge.

Tell me about a time when you needed help from someone during a project.

Tell me your favorite Data Structures.

Arrays vs LinkedList ( Pros and Cons )

Then he moved on to the coding question: https://leetcode.com/problems/intersection-of-two-linked-lists/
He defined the problem statement and told me to explain the approach with complexity analysis. I was able to explain him and then he moved forward.

Next set of questions were from Core CS subjects like :

What happens when you type "www.google.com" in your browser. Explain the complete workflow
Difference between router and switch
TCP vs UDP in depth. What to prefer for Video Streaming online ?
Indexing Questions from DBMS

03
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration40 minutes
Interview date14 Nov 2021
Coding problem1

The interviewer was a Senior Software Engineer at Cisco.

Again started with the questions :

Tell me about your yourself.
What work you did in your past Internships.
Explain your projects.
Moved on to Coding Question.

Asked me If I was aware about Dynammic Programming.
Explain the approaches of DP ( Memoization , Tabulation )
Time Complexity in each of the approaches.
Which would be the better approach with proper explanantion.
Coding Ques : https://leetcode.com/problems/coin-change/
Explain the edge case along with the approach.

Some General Managerial Questions towards the end of Interview.

1. Coin Change

Hard
0/120
Asked in companies
IBMCiscoThought Works

You are given an array of integers ‘coins’ denoting the denomination of coins and another array of integers ‘freq’ denoting the number of coins of each denomination.

You have to find the number of ways to make the sum ‘V’ by selecting some(or all) coins from the array.

The answer can be very large. So, return the answer modulo 1000000007.

For Example :
‘N’ = 3, ‘coins’ = {1, 2, 3}, ‘freq’ = {1, 1, 3}, ‘V’ = 6

For the given example, we can make six by using the following coins:
{1, 2, 3}
{3. 3}
Hence, the answer is 2.
Problem approach

int coinChange(vector& coins, int amount) {
int dp[++amount];
dp[0]=0;
sort(coins.begin(),coins.end());
for(int i=1;i {
dp[i]=INT_MAX;
for(int c:coins)
{
if(i-c<0)
break;
if(dp[i-c]!=INT_MAX)
dp[i]=min(dp[i],1+dp[i-c]);
}
}
return dp[--amount]==INT_MAX?-1:dp[amount];
}

Try solving now

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