Hello guys, I am final year student studying computer science and engineering from tier 2 college.
In this post, I am sharing my experience of Code With Cisco.
I participated in Code With Cisco along with my team in June 2023.

Process:

Online Assesment:
It was the 1 hour online coding assesment. There were three questions of difficulty medium to hard. (two of them were of dp and one was greedy).
My team was able to solve all the three problem in 49 minutes.

On Sept 1 we got a mail that my team was uable to qualify for the in-person Code-a-thon event, but we got the opportunity to attend an additional round of individual Cisco online assesment.

Individual Online Assesment:
It was a 90 minutes long online assesment consist of 2 coding question (medium - greedy and hard - dp (similar to cherry pickup on LeetCode)) and around 30 MCQs based on core subjects, aptitude, maths and networking. This round went very well for me.

After 40 days, I received mail that I was shortlisted for the interviews at Cisco. We had to submit the new inclusive resumes (excluding cpi, name, institute's name, etc). We were invited to Webex space and we had to waited for the our interview turn.

Round 1 - Technical Round:
In this round, interviewer asked questions from my resume and some questions on OS and Computer Networks. Questions asked on OS and Computer Networks were completly practical based questions, not a standard questions. This round went ok ok for me.

Round 2 - Managerial Round:
After 2 hour, I got call for managerial round. In this round also, interviewer asked me questions from my resume and basic managerial question. Interviewer also asked some technical questions:

Question 1 : Design the dictionary. My first approach was to use HashMap. Then I told to use Trie which give auto complete feature. Interview wanted me to optimize it further but I couldn't able to optimize it more. (Interviewer was expecting from me to use multi-threading for optimization).

Question 2 : How implementation of linked list using double pointer give more advantage than using single pointer.

Question 3: What happens when you type cisco.com on browser. (Easy one, as I was already prepared for it).

This round went very well for me and I had a very good discussion with the interviewer. I was very confident for next round.

Round 3 - Exec Round:
In this round also, interviewer asked questions from my resume. This round was more of discussion round for me. Practical and Situation based questions were asked in this round. Interviwer also asked puzzles and some basic questions related to DSA and OOPS.
Questions:

• How many sorting algorithms do you know?
• What is merge sort?
• Difference between merge sort and bubble sort.
• Difference between inheritance in java and c++.

Round 4 - HR round:
Just discussion round and basic HR question like:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What do you know about Cisco?
• Are you willing to relocate.
• Are you available for internship?
  etc.

All the rounds were almost 60-70 minutes long and HR round was around 10 minutes long. In all the rounds interviewers were so nice and having experience of more than 15 years.

After 2 weeks, I got the selection mail.

Tips:

• Do not lie in your resume and prepare your resume very well. In all rounds they ask questions from resume.
• Prepare core subjects along with DSA.
• Be confident.
• Ask good questions at the end of interview.
• And lastly keep smiling during the interview.