CISCO SDE interview experience

I was shortlisted for an SDE position at Cisco. My interview journey began with a phone screen with the hiring manager, which was a deep dive into my resume. I elaborated on the products I'd worked on, their tech stacks, and discussed my familiarity with the job requirements, the team's culture, and the product itself.

Subsequently, I proceeded to the coding rounds. The first coding round started with a discussion about my resume and further deep-dives into my projects and the technologies I used. I was also asked some theoretical questions, including:

• What is the difference between SSH and TLS?
• Inner join vs Outer join in databases?
• Transactions and its uses in databases (where I explained ACID properties).

For the coding part, I was given a LeetCode medium difficulty question, which was Maximum Subarray.

I moved on to the second coding round, which focused more on Golang, given it was a Go development role. This round tested my knowledge of Go syntax, goroutines, unbuffered and buffered channels, mutexes, and waitgroups. Specifically, I was asked to write a Fibonacci program in Go using channels and goroutines. There were also a few more resume-based questions.

Finally, I had a managerial round where we discussed my projects, tech stack, daily requirements for the role, and expectations. Although the hiring manager provided positive feedback after this round, they ultimately decided to move forward with a more experienced candidate who had direct experience with their specific tech stack. Unfortunately, I was not offered the job.