Cisco Interview Questions, Process, and Tips for Freshers

Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The 1st round was a MCQ round consisting of 50 problems in 1 hour. The questions were from aptitude, Data structures, microprocessors and some common puzzles.

Q1. What is the Josephus problem, and how does it relate to the concept of the Queens?
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The interview started with the general Tell me about Yourself. He mainly wanted to know my subjects and fields of interest. he gave a DSA question. You are given a sorted array and your objective is to construct a BST out of it. The constructed BST should have the shortest possible height. I had to first explain my approach to the problem and when he was convinced I was asked to write the full code for the problem

Q1. 
Dijkstra's Shortest Path Problem Statement
You are given an undirected graph with V vertices (numbered from 0 to V-1) and E edges. Each edge connects two nodes u and v and has an associated weight represe...read more
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Round duration - 10 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

HR asked me about my zone of interests and explained to me some basic rules and what I have to do if I face any kind of problem

Round duration - 60 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was the initial round consisting of some aptitude questions,technical multiple choice questions and one coding question.
The Multiple Choice Questions were pretty straight forward.

Q1. 
Snake and Ladder Problem Statement
Given a 'Snake and Ladder' board with N rows and N columns, where positions are numbered from 1 to (N*N) starting from the bottom left, alternating direction each row, f...read more
Ans. 
Find the minimum number of dice throws required to reach the last cell on a 'Snake and Ladder' board.
• Start from the bottom left cell and move according to dice outcomes (1-6).

• Utilize snakes and ladders to reach the last cell faster.

• Keep track of the minimum number of throws required to reach the last cell.

• If unreachable, return -1 as output.
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Round duration - 45 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

I had two interviewers in this round.Some Problem solving questions were asked in this round.

Q1. 
Anagram Pairs Verification Problem
Your task is to determine if two given strings are anagrams of each other. Two strings are considered anagrams if you can rearrange the letters of one string to form the...read more
Ans. 
Check if two strings are anagrams of each other by comparing their sorted characters.
• Sort the characters of both strings and compare them.

• Use a dictionary to count the frequency of characters in each string and compare the dictionaries.

• Ensure both strings have the same length before proceeding with comparison.

• Example: For input 'spar' and 'rasp', after sorting both strings, they become 'aprs' which are equal, so return
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Q2. Can you explain all the main Object Oriented Programming concepts?
Ans. 
Object Oriented Programming concepts include encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction.
• Encapsulation: Bundling data and methods that operate on the data into a single unit (class). Example: Class Car with properties like color and methods like drive().

• Inheritance: Creating new classes based on existing classes, inheriting their attributes and methods. Example: Class SUV inheriting from class Car.

• Polymor...read more
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Q3. Can you explain one of your projects?
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Round duration - 45 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Number Of Interviewers : 2
I was asked two problem solving questions and I was asked to explain my projects.

Round duration - 70 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Interviewer was very nice and made me feel pretty comfortable. We talked about our hobbies for about 10mins and then he asked about my projects and which was my favourite of all. He then asked me a coding question. Which was like pretty easy and I gave him the optimized approach right away. He was satisfied with my approach and just moved on to the next part. He asked me some basic questions related to Operating Systems(related to deadlocks and semaphores). He even asked some basic questions related to OOPS. Then he gave me the next question. This was like a pretty new question for me and I took some time to understand the problem statement and then took some time to think about the logic. I was also sharing my approach with interviewer as well.I finally told him about my approach. He told me that my approach was fine but there also was some other approach but normally no-one would come up with that approach until they have previously solved the question.

Q1. 
Subtree Node Count Problem
We are provided with a tree containing 'N' nodes, numbered from 0 to N-1. The objective is to determine the total number of nodes within each subtree of the provided tree. Speci...read more
Ans. 
Given a tree, find the number of nodes in each subtree rooted at every node.
• Traverse the tree using Depth First Search (DFS) to count nodes in each subtree.

• Maintain a count of nodes in each subtree while traversing the tree.

• Start the DFS from the root node (node 0) and recursively count nodes in each subtree.

• For leaf nodes, the subtree size will be 1 (the node itself).
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Round duration - 30 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Interviewer seemed to be a senior manager.He just asked about me and started with the interview.Interviewer asked me to design a standard map(hash-map). I gave him my approach and he also asked me to devise a hash function for it. I also gave him a hash function and he seemed to be pretty satisfied.

Q1. Design a basic hash map.
Ans. 
Design a basic hash map
• Use an array of linked lists to handle collisions

• Implement methods for adding, removing, and retrieving key-value pairs

• Include a hashing function to map keys to indices in the array
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The test was in the evening which was not too late. It was conducted on Hackerrank which is a very common platform and was hence familiar. There were 26 questions:
Q1: Coding Question
3 languages were allowed: c, java8, python3
Q2 - Q26: Multiple Choice Questions

Q1. 
Intersection of Linked List Problem
You are provided with two singly linked lists containing integers, where both lists converge at some node belonging to a third linked list.
Your task is to determine t...read more
Ans. 
Find the node where two linked lists merge, return -1 if no merging occurs.
• Traverse both lists to find the lengths and the last nodes

• Align the starting points of both lists by moving the longer list's pointer ahead by the difference in lengths

• Traverse both lists simultaneously until a common node is found, which is the merging point
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