Difficulty: Medium
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There were 3 Rounds of interview. 2 Technical and 3rd Hiring Manager.
A new thing I saw in cisco is their Blind Interviews. The interviewer is not allowed to know anything about you except your Name(so they can't ask my experience, skillset, location, current company etc). The first 2 interviews were Blind and 3rd was not blind(with Hiring manager).
Common things about all 3 interviews were:
Every interviewer was very humble and helpful.
Any language was allowed to solve problems
After giving solution, frequently they would add a new constraint(like asking to replace the data structure you used with something else, increasing the input range and data type, customizing solution to reduce memory usage or increase speed further) and see if I can still solve the problem.
I learned atleast 1 or 2 new things from suggestions/help/discussions with interviewer.
Interview 1: Very friendly interviewer. We were mostly joking around and laughing together.
A singly Linked List(Alphabets as value [a-z]) has duplicate items. Group the common items together.
For example:
If list is head-> a b c a a b b
then output can be -> b b b a a a c
There is a List of words in input and exactly 2 words(a pair) in this list are anagrams of each other. Print out the first word of each anagram-pair.
For example:
Input:
cat
dog
act
god
wor
row
Output:
cat
dog
wor
Interview 2: This guys was very serious and talking only to the point.
Implement your own String class.
How Heap work, implement all heap operations.
Implement your own Hashmap (with a special requirement that you can't use vector; but using array is allowed. IDK why he wanted that :D )
Interview 3 (Hiring Manager): Friendly guy, was actually listening to me(unlike other hiring manager I have interviewed with who are half sunk into their office work while taking interview) and after discussion he even suggested me few improvements in current company's project :D
Questions and discussion regarding things mentioned in Resume.
Count the number of set bits in a number.
Some tips:
Be yourself.
For hiring manger round: Know about each and everything you have mentioned in resume. I have read in Glassdoor also that hiring manager tend to pick up anything in resume and go into it's details, same thing happened with me.
Keep talking about whatever is coming in your mind. Even if you reject a (sub-optimal) solution in your mind, just let them know that.
They use Cisco Webex for interviews. So try to join 5-10 mins before the interview, because Webex hangs at loading LOL