Cisco Software Engineer interview questions

There were two interviews, first with the manager, second technical on WebEx. They moved quickly, from start to finish within a month. Some may find the questions difficult, but the persons behind them were friendly. A background check was performed to confirm the information set forward in my Curriculum Vitae.

First off, the start to the interview felt very cold. The interviewer did not introduce himself. He seemed uninterested and un prepared for the interview which is evident from the fact that, I was asked what my name was and whether I was interviewing for a full time position or an internship. It felt like he just wanted to get it over with. With in the first 5 minutes, I was asked why I had applied for CISCO despite not having any network experience. While it is a legitimate question, it just gave a very negative vibe. I was taken aback but I tried to gather myself and pointed to my 2 years of work experience with Ericson and we had a conversation about that. At this point, I figured I wasn’t doing so well and as I was trying hard to collect my thoughts. The interviewer seemed to show signs of impatience and borderline annoyance; which made it all the more difficult to think straight. I was asked another question about centralized and distributed systems which I could not answer well mostly due to my own fault. Next we moved on to my knowledge about languages and I was asked vague questions such as “How much do you know about python?” “How much do you know about C++?” and “How much do you know about UNIX”? I tried to answer the questions by stating how I had used these languages in my projects in grad school and my professional career. Towards the end, I felt like the interviewer hadn’t looked in detail over my resume and we did not talk about the most interesting and innovative projects that I worked on in grad school. I broached this topic and gave a brief overview of the kind of projects I worked on. That brought us towards the end of the interview. Overall, the interviewer seemed unprofessional, interested and seemed noticeably annoyed when my answers were not what he was looking for. This made it all the more hard for me to recover from a bad start. While I most definitely would not blame the interviewer for my poor performance, I wish he was more professional and less annoyed so that the entire experience would have been a positive one despite my bad performance. I had done badly in interviews before with companies like Facebook and Amazon, but I was made to feel welcome and I was intellectually challenged in the interviews. In the end I always came out of the interviews thoroughly enjoying them even though I knew I may not have done well. Unfortunately CISCO has been a polar opposite experience where I was and made to feel unwelcome and my intellectual capabilities were not tested.