Cisco Networking Academy Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Round duration - 50 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Two panellist were there, one was asking question based upon CN + OS + DBMS, one was asking question based upon DS + Algo.

Q1. Technical Questions
1. Working of PING and TRACEROUTE command 
2. OSI layers and it’s responsibility 
3. Indexing in database
4. B/B+ tree used in index, asked me to explain node structure of both
5.Q...read more
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Q2. Insert Into A Binary Search Tree
You have been given a root node of the binary search tree and a positive integer value. You need to perform an insertion operation i.e. inserting a new node with the given ...read more
Ans. Recursive Approach
The rules of the binary search tree say if any node value is less than the root node value, then this node must lie on the left subtree of the root else will lie on the right subtree. We can think of a recursive solution by breaking the task into a subtask, as any node can be either on the left subtree or right subtree of the root node. In BST we can find which subtree (left/right) to follow next by c...read more
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Q3. LCA In A BST
You are given a binary search tree of integers with N nodes. You are also given references to two nodes P and Q from this BST.
Your task is to find the lowest common ancestor(LCA) of these t...read more
Ans. Depth - First Traversal
We will traverse the BST in a depth-first manner. The moment we encounter either of the nodes P or Q, we will return some boolean flag. The least common ancestor would then be the node for which both the subtree recursions return a ‘True’  flag value.   
 
The algorithm will be -
• We will start traversing a BST from the root node in a recursive manner.
• Let the current node in each...read more
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 50 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. General Questions
1. Asked me about my work experience and project I worked on
2. Asked me about most difficult challenge I faced and how I tackled it
3. Implement multiplication without using multiplication ...read more
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Round duration - 15 Minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. Basic HR Questions
What are your strengths and weakness?
What do you expect from this organization?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
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Round duration - 90 minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The test was scheduled on 1st November 2020 at 6 pm . 
Platform: Hackerrank
Number of questions : 2 coding and 25 MCQ
Language allowed for coding ques : Java ( Cisco only allows java )
Difficulty level : Moderate - Hard
Tip : Focus on one coding ques and do maximum MCQ's , it will be enough.

Q1. Aptitude Question
Mr. X runs a neet of 10 cabs at a renowned cab company. The cab company has two types of tlme based slots for differential payment Peak hours (0800-1000 , 1600-1800) payment ls X and off p...read more
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Q2. Snake and Ladder
You have been given a Snake and Ladder Board with 'N' rows and 'N' columns with the numbers written from 1 to (N*N) starting from the bottom left of the board, and alternat...read more
Ans. BFS
We will use Breadth-First Search to find the shortest path from cellNumber 1 to cellNumber N*N.
1. We will maintain a queue of cellNumber where the front of the queue will always contain a cell which can be reached by minimum dice throw from starting cell (cellNumber = 1).
2. Create a minDiceThrow array of size N*N initialise it with the maximum value (INT_MAX)
3. Start with pushing cellNumber 1 and updating minDiceThrow[1] = 0...read more
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 80 Minutes
Round difficulty - Medium

The technical interview was scheduled on webex teams at 10 am on 11th November 2020.
There were 2 panelists.
Interview went on for around 80 mins where they asked me questions on resume , projects , internships , Networking and Dsa .
Networking was asked because i mentioned a project on my resume that uses Socket.io .
Most of the time of interview was taken up by Dsa question.

Q1. Corporate Flight Bookings
You have been given an array/list “BOOKINGS” of booking details of ‘N’ flights from 1 to ‘N’. Each booking detail contains three positive integers [first, last, seats] which repre...read more
Ans. Brute Force
Approach: The basic idea for this approach is to traverse through each booking detail and then iterate through the range of flights for updating the count of reserved seats for each flight.
 
Consider the following steps:
1. Create an empty array/list 'ANSWER' to store the total number of seats reserved for ith flight (0-based indexing).
2. Now, traverse through each booking detail.
   • Let [START, END, SEATS] be the ...read more
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 90 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This round consist of 2 coding questions and they were of good level based on strings and dynamic programming.

Q1. Longest Unique Substring
Return the length of the longest substring consisting of unique characters.
eg: abcabcdb ------> 4 4 corresponds to abcd 
aaaaaxxxxxxwyzzzzzxxxxx ------> 4 4 corresponds to...read more
Ans. 
• I solved this question using a sliding window concept and taken a map while traversing the string to check if any repeated characters appear or not.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Q2.  Arithmetic Operators
 Given an arithmetic expression containing '+', '-', '*' operators, generate a string by placing parenthesis in the given expression which will return the the maximum possible val...read more
Ans. 
I solved this question using recursion by putting bracket at all possible places and evaluate the answer through recursion and found the maximum out of them.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Round duration - 20 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

Q1. Left View of Binary Tree
Given a Binary Tree, print left view of it. The left view of a Binary Tree is set of nodes visible when the tree is visited from the left side.
Ans. 
I did level order traversal and then printed the first element of each level.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Q2. Minimum From Bag
Suggest the best way to get the minimum (at any point of time) from a bag in which numbers are being inserted and removed continuously.
Ans. 
• I answered, "using a heap" as log N is the complexity to add or remove from the heap.
  
Answered by CodingNinjas
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Q3. Kruskal's Algorithm
Given an undirected graph, find the Minimum Spanning Tree. 
Ans. 
I explained Kruskal’s algorithm to find the Minimum spanning tree with an example of a graph. He was satisfied by my approach and gave a smile through which I got the idea that I will be selected for the company.
Answered by CodingNinjas
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