Cisco Interview Experience – Engineering Role

Round 1:
1) Since I have mentioned two projects developed using python in my
resume, they started the questions towards python.
 Why need of python?
 Why I choose python for networking while other languages like java
supports?
 Are there any advantages of using python over C++ in terms of object
oriented?

2) Asked about questions from my internship project. I have mentioned

YAML Parser as one of the project, they asked how do you handle the
corner cases and what are all the errors I have been aware of?

3) Asked some questions in data structure and asked me to write code

Reverse a linked list without any data structure and changing the links.
Level order traversal of a tree
K-th largest element using BST
4) Asked a general puzzle, where I’ll be given weight balancing machine and
8 stones, out of all the stones, one will be of weight less than all other
stones. How will you find the stone with min number of attempts?( 2
attempts ).

5) Asked about some basic object-oriented concepts

Round 2:
This round is fully about AWS, which I have mentioned in project
 Which region is best for deploying applications?
 Why I use Cognito for user identification?
 What I choose AWS over other cloud platforms provided by MS or
google?
 What is VPC?
 How to connect EC2 instance with CLI?
 How Dynamo DB is different from other sql or no sql dB’s?
 What is the use of S3 and asked about the situations of where to use
s3 and s3 glacier?
 When trying to initiate SSH connection but it fails. What are all the
possible reasons for failure.
  If my application hosted in EC2 is down. How can I resolve that?
(snapshot method)

Round 3:
This round is manager round.

 If there’s an existing solution suggested by head or someone higher

than me and there are other 2 solutions which is better according to
me. But the problem here is, for the first case I would be accountable
only for the implementation part not for the soln part. But for the
other 3 solns I’ll accountable for both idea and implementation.
Which will I choose?
(I answered this question in a way that I’m not scared of taking
responsibilities)
 There is soft copy of some book, he gave print and then went to have
coffee, But when he returns he found some page to be missing. What
is the best way to find the missing page and assume that pages are in
unsorted order?
 There is a 4 cross road and they were getting stuck due to the heavy
traffic. How will you clear this situation? (Think it is in OS deadlock
way, use bankers algo kind of thing to derive safe sequence).
 If I have allocated the memory of array with capacity of ten and
returned the address of first value to me. How to detect the value 10
which is allocated?
(Since it’s contiguous memory I said on incrementing addresses after
certain point, the order won’t be maintained BUT It’s Wrong )

Round 4: Asked some basic HR questions.