Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. La procedura ha richiesto 5 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Cisco (Toronto, ON) nel mese di ago 2019
Colloquio
I was contacted by a recruiter who forwarded my details to a hiring manager. That hiring manager contacted me and after some introductory chat asked me to solve a code challenge. I did the code challenge (about 4 hours of my time) which seemed to impress the hiring manager and the team.
Then I was phone screened by an engineer which went well. For some reason the hiring manager directed me to a different position so I got contacted by a different hiring manager. I had another phone screen with another engineer of this second hiring manager which went also pretty well. To a surprise I was directed back to the initial hiring manager for some reason and invited to an onsite. I attended the scheduled onsite which consisted of about 5 interviews in a row, most of them around 45 minutes tech and behavioral questions. I had the impression I did all interviews pretty well. Some whiteboard sketching was involved in one or two interviews.
Apart from the technical aspects which I solved fairly well, I also was very honest about my likes and dislikes on behavioral questions, also about potential reasons to leave my current employer. I suspect this openness may have raised some red flags or concerns for some interviewers and this might have influenced their decision to the contrary. It's perhaps down to cultural aspects that I'm not used to yet. Anyhow, I prefer honesty and directness instead of making something up to shine, maybe it wasn't the perfect approach to them.
In the end I wasn't extended an offer. Either because I appeared too direct on certain soft skills, or I'm too senior (expensive?) for the position they were hiring for (currently with a FANG company) or they just were kind and wanted to make my decision easier (sometimes interviewers might actually be of help rejecting someone they like for the reason that they aren't happy with their own future prospects at that company).
I'll never know the real reason, but do think they have a pretty good hiring process.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Design a scalable REST service to store some secrets.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite segnalazione di un dipendente. La procedura ha richiesto un giorno. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Cisco (Bengaluru)
Colloquio
I applied for the position and successfully attended the screening and coding round. The interview mainly focused on C programming and networking concepts, including IP subnetting, bitwise operations, and implementing logic to verify if an IP belongs to a subnet. There were also questions on TCP/UDP and debugging concepts. After the interview, I followed up with the recruiter, who shared that based on the feedback, my profile will not proceed further.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 2 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Cisco (Tel Aviv) nel mese di dic 2025
Colloquio
After applying on site I was reached by a recruiter which asked a few role specific questions and scheduled an technical interview with the recruiting manager.
First interview:
Introduction, tell me about yourself etc and the main question was "Talk about a system that you worked on end to end".
Second Interview:
System design interview. Role specific system, nothing special just a bit tricky. (not design youtube or twitter or anything like that).
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Talk about a system that you worked on end to end.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. La procedura ha richiesto 2 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Cisco (Bengaluru) nel mese di ott 2025
Colloquio
I was reached out by the recruiter, and the interview was scheduled for the next week. Enough time was given to me for the preparation.
Total of 5 rounds were planned in advanced, and I was told I will proceed to the next rounds if I clear the previous rounds. (Eliminations)
First Round: General discussion on what I have worked on. No surprises.
Second Round: A practical coding questions, mix of low level and high level system design. Interviewer gave clear instructions about what is expected in each task. This round went smoothly from my point of view.
Third Round: This was the round where things went upside down. Interviewer joined 30 minutes late, and seemed uninterested. The interviewer did not follow the basic etiquettes. He spend 5-10 minutes reading my resume on spot, with no communication and awkward silence.
Next 10-15 minutes followed on general question about what I had worked on in the past.
Then I was given a puzzle question, with certain constraints (No code required, verbal solution was asked). I could not solve it optimally. Even the interviewer was confused and he couldn't solve it with the constraints given.
(After the interview, I googled the solution for the same problem, and came to know the constraints were a little different).
Got a call from the recruiter after 30 minutes that I was not selected, and need not join for the next rounds.
TLDR:
Difficulty wise I would say the interview was of medium difficulty.
DSA - Leetcode easy and easy-medium.
System Design - Practical questions, no surprises.
Low Level Design - Practical questions which most developers would have already worked on.
But a lot depends on the interviewer.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
System Design: Design a distributed message queue.
Low Level Design: Design a rate limiter.
Coding: From the two streams of very large numbers (not able to fit in int64 or float64), calculate the running sum and send the response over the third stream.
Puzzle: You have a set of 8 balls. 7 are of the same weight, and 1 is of different weight (may be lighter, may be heavier). Find the odd weight ball in minimum number of tries using a weighing scale.