I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco in May 2010
Interview
The hiring manager called me up on phone and asked reasonable technical questions. Priority Invertion, Deadlock, Mutexes. Keep in mind that this was probably for a position which required very good OS concepts. I gave satisfactory answers and he arranged for a 1:1 the next week. The onsite interview had about 5 people. First one was hiring manager himnself. Gave a C test. Simple sorted array merging. I had rusty hands. Followed by another enginner who grilled me on OS concepts. How is executable format stored and loaded. Where are variables stored. How are interrupts handled etc. Majorly OS related stuff. Also recursion C questions. This was followed by another round of hard core questions on OS, threads and non amskable interrupts followed by a simple question on linked list. Need to know basics about datas tructures and algorithms. Which one is more efficient etc. After this a member from different team came by, asked some questions on my earlier work and another tree recursion program. This followed by the hiring manager of another team, asked basic question on my previous work and other problem solving scenarios when two processes are communicating with each other(IPCs). I was asked to come by for a second round after a week. The first 1:1 was difficult for me. Some questions on semaphores, mutexes. C programming question specifically targeting your knowledge of bitwise operators and memory management. Did not do so well. This followed by simple rounds by 2 other persons. Previous work. Multiple processor programming etc.. Overall, I probably needed more experience in the area that they wanted. Did not get the offer.
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.
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