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
They care about your skills, rather than your background. They have a template which they provide and you got to fill that, everyone is provided a unique number. You are instructed not to disclose any of your personal details in the due course of your interview.
The interview process was two rounds. The first round was a behavioral interview. Straightforward questions, like tell me about the most technically challenging project you have worked on. The second round was a system design interview.
3 technical rounds of 35-45 mins each for a 5 years experience JS fullstack.
1. Project currently working on + design patterns employed and resume based questions in details to check the depth.
2. System design interview - asked me to mention an approach to design a microservice for retail client. Followed up by questions on why I've chosen a particular tech stack and questions on how to tackle certain situations in real word on such services (inventory + payments etc).
3. DS based test - question was bit easy.