I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Dec 2012
Interview
It was 3 hours long with 4 interviewers. They asked questions on Java, data structures, and single sign-on. It was average for a senior software engineer, not too tough and not too easy. It was appropriate for the position.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Cisco (Boston, MA) in Aug 2016
Interview
Asked about the resume, then several basic data structures, binary tree search, tree traversal, etc. Also asked about some basic algorithms, BFS, DFS, backtracking, recursion, etc. One hard question is about construct a binary search tree using heap, or priorityqueue. Also some questions about Java, Class, Objects, etc.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco (Pilani) in Aug 2016
Interview
The interview rounds were smooth. I cleared the written test round and went through for technical. I had 2 technical rounds which were more in line with software development and had questions from Data Structures and Algos. The questions mainly revolved around strings and a little bit of hashing as well. I answered the questions well. But I could not go through to the HR round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the longest palindromic substring of a given string