I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Cisco (Bengaluru)
Interview
Applied via company website.
6 rounds of Telephonic Interview. Of these 4 callers were from India, 2 from USA.
2 rounds of Face to Face
Telephonic interviews were fairly technical and long - each one at least 45 minutes, and some over 1 hour. All this spread over 2 months plus. They went very well and quite good.
The telephonic interviewers were generally polite, to the point, and asked probing technical questions.
Next, was invited for Face to Face discussion. Total time set aside for this was about 3 hours.
Met the HR person for the first time here and had a brief chat. She asked some basic stuff and how soon i could join, and if it was possible to join early.
Discussion with a hiring (senior) manager was fine. Not really technical, and included some white-boarding. Yet overall good.
Next discussion with a Director was a joke. Things went downhill from here.
The Director appeared to be new to the company, and was seriously challenged about technology, but was conducting a tech interview. It was hilarious, and he did not understand any answers given to him. This was also shocking because this was a top tier Technology Company!
The outsourced Recruitment Team is terrible to say the least. Most of the day to day recruitment work seems to have been outsourced to another company called - Accenture LLC - and these folks are disorganised, confused and easily get things mixed up including your resume. They would call up at 7pm in the evening and try to setup a telephonic interview for 6 AM in the morning - and would not understand that this was too short a notice for an interview at an odd hour!
Next, background check process was initiated, and after about two weeks, received a mail congratulating and confirming successful completion of the background check.
Beyond this there was absolutely no communication - nothing - not even a regret note or a thank you mail.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the key parts of the application to look at to get rid of performance bottle-necks, how would you examine each part?
How would you efficiently process(speed, scalability) a very large number of notifications/alerts being generated from a variety of devices?