The start to the interview felt very cold. The interviewer did not introduce himself. He seemed uninterested and unprepared for the interview, which was evident when I was asked what my name was and whether I was interviewing for a full-time position or an internship. It felt like he just wanted to get it over with.

Within the first five minutes, I was asked why I had applied to CISCO despite not having any network experience. While it is a legitimate question, it gave a very negative vibe. I was taken aback but tried to gather myself and pointed to my two years of work experience with Ericsson, and we had a conversation about that.

At this point, I figured I wasn’t doing so well, and as I was trying hard to collect my thoughts, the interviewer seemed to show signs of impatience and borderline annoyance, which made it all the more difficult to think straight. I was asked another question about centralized and distributed systems, which I could not answer well, mostly due to my own fault.

Next, we moved on to my knowledge about languages. I was asked vague questions such as, "How much do you know about Python?" "How much do you know about C++?" and "How much do you know about UNIX?" I tried to answer by stating how I had used these languages in my projects during grad school and my professional career.

Towards the end, I felt like the interviewer hadn’t looked in detail over my resume, and we did not talk about the most interesting and innovative projects I worked on in grad school. I broached this topic and gave a brief overview of the kind of projects I worked on. That brought us toward the end of the interview.

Overall, the interviewer seemed unprofessional and uninterested, and he seemed noticeably annoyed when my answers were not what he was looking for. This made it all the harder for me to recover from a bad start. While I most definitely would not blame the interviewer for my poor performance, I wish he had been more professional and less annoyed so that the entire experience would have been a positive one despite my bad performance.

I had performed poorly in interviews before with companies like Facebook and Amazon, but I was made to feel welcome and intellectually challenged. In the end, I always came out of those interviews thoroughly enjoying them, even though I knew I might not have done well. Unfortunately, CISCO has been the polar opposite experience, where I was made to feel unwelcome, and my intellectual capabilities were not tested.

Why Cisco?

Why did you apply for Cisco? You don't seem to have any networking background.

Centralized vs. Distributed Architecture

What is SNMP?

How do you do test analysis in Python?

How much do you know UNIX and C++?