I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2010
Interview
Applied online and got a phone interview with Cisco Systems for a software engineering position. The interviewer was very friendly and first started asking questions on my resume and previous projects. Then slowly started asking more difficult questions geared towards programming and networking knowledge. The interview lasted for almost one hour with most questions of the type "what are threads?, what are local and global variables?, what is heap memory?, explain tcp sliding window mechanism and congestion avoidance", etc. Overall it was a fairly good interview experience and I'm waiting to hear back from them about the results.
The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Nov 2009
Interview
Pretty decent experience. Just consisted of a phone interview followed by a 1-on-1 interview. This was for the Cisco Choice Program. Very friendly person. Interview wasn't too technical. More like a conversation really. Not too bad experience overall!
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Oct 2008
Interview
I got an interview on campus. Basic questions about myself and the company: "Tell me about yourself", "How do I know if you are the right person for my company?"...No technical
Then 1 month later I got an invitation including hotel and flight ticket to San Jose for 2 days.
It started with a dinner with Cisco employees.
The next days, we are divided into 3-person groups. Each group will be interview individually by 3 other engineers. They basically asked about my group projects. Gave some technical questions about Java like "What is inheritance?". The last guy will ask harder questions in C programming skill "Write a code to reverse the words in a string?" "Optimize it"