Cisco
Fresher
Other
7+ CPI (46 LPA)
Application Process
I applied through an off-campus hiring drive via their careers portal. Updates came via email for each stage; it was smooth and well-organized, fully online.
Interview Rounds (2)
Detailed breakdown of each evaluation round, problems encountered, and round takeaways.
Online Coding Interview
Questions & Problems Asked (3)
Problem: Detect Cycle In A Directed Graph
DFS with visited + recursion-stack arrays; a node already on the stack means a cycle.
Problem: Dijkstra's Shortest Path
I initially misread it as needing K shortest paths, so I used Dijkstra plus a priority queue of candidate paths.
Problem: Making The Largest Island
I labeled islands via DFS, stored sizes by ID, then for each 0-cell summed unique neighboring island sizes + 1 to find the max possible flip.
Video Call
Questions & Problems Asked (2)
Problem: Minimum Path Sum
I framed it as a BFS with an obstacle-elimination budget tracked per state.
Problem: Network Monitoring (System Design)
I discussed requirements, collectors/load balancers/Kafka-style queues/time-series DBs, and aggregation/caching/fault tolerance for scale.
Round Experience
OS: deadlocks, demand paging/page replacement, Producer-Consumer with semaphores. My tips: understand synchronization/deadlocks/memory management deeply, explain with diagrams.
My selection perspective: I cleared the initial stages but wasn't selected later, when the discussion went deep on networking and system-level concepts I hadn't prepared enough for.
Round 2 — My Takeaways
- DSA thoroughly, aptitude/puzzles, two good explained projects, arrays/binary search/DP/recursion, common HR questions.
Resume Tips
Highlight strong projects/internships.
Keep it concise, only what I can confidently explain.
Preparation Tips
Practice DSA consistently, logic over patterns.
Strengthen CN, OS, DBMS.
Work on a few strong projects, ready to explain design choices.
