Cisco - Software Engineering Intern | Summer 2018

Job Hunting Interview
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Introduction

Status: 2nd year Computer Engineering grad student @ NCSU
Position: Software Engineering Intern
Location: RTP, NC

As a 2nd year graduate student studying Computer Engineering at NCSU, I applied to Cisco with the hope of recieving a summer internship offer in a software engineering team. Both interviews were held over Webex. I prepared quite thoroughly for this interview, including reading and completing most of the challenges in Gayle Laakmann’s Cracking the Coding Interview . I personally thought the interview was quite easy and was able to answer all of the questions without hesitation. As far as I have heard from interns and other recent hires, most Cisco interviews for fresh college grads are among a similar level of difficulty. Below is a breakdown of the questions I was asked.

Technical Phone screen (30 minutes):

  • Behavioral Questions
    • How to handle conflict in team
  • Algorithm Questions
    • Write a program to compute the first 1000 primes
    • Implement a linked list class

2nd Technical phone screen (1 hour):

  • Behavioral Questions
    • Favorite project that you’ve worked on (with a team)
    • How did you overcome challenges (using teamwork)
  • Algorithm Questions
    • Write a function to find the length of an array
    • Write a function to find duplicates in an array
    • Implement Bubble Sort
      • Analyze time and space complexity of your implementation
    • Implement atoi
  • Knowledge Questions
    • General OO programming principles
      • Encapsulation, Inheritance, Abstaction, Polymorhpism
    • Basic database concepts
      • SQL vs NoSQL
      • Experience with major database servers
    • Basic data structures
      • Linked list
      • Heap
      • Stack

Conclusion

I may have forgotten a few behavioral and knowledge-based questions asked, I don’t think I missed any significant questions however. All in all it was a light, conversation-based interview with plenty of side chat, it did not feel like an interrogation at all. I recieved an offer from thema couple weeks later and am currently working here as an intern. Happy to provide further insight if needed.

  • laballab