Applied for a new grad SWE role at Cisco San Jose this spring. Here's the full breakdown of the coding rounds because I couldn't find recent info anywhere.
Online Assessment (OA): two coding problems, 75 minutes total. Platform was HackerRank. The first problem was a graph traversal question involving network topology, basically BFS to find the minimum hops between nodes under certain constraints. The second was a string manipulation / regex-style parsing problem. Both were medium difficulty on LeetCode scale. Nothing I'd call hard. Test cases were visible for the first problem, hidden for the second.
I had about 5 days to complete the OA after the recruiter sent the link.
Phone Screen (technical): one coding problem on a shared editor (CoderPad), 45 minutes. The interviewer was a senior SWE. Problem was a two-pointer / sliding window question on an array of packet sizes (again, networking-adjacent framing). He asked me to walk through edge cases before coding, which I appreciated. I was able to finish and he had about 10 minutes of follow-up questions about time and space complexity plus one variant of the problem.
Difficulty compared to big tech: honestly easier than Google/Meta in my experience. The problems have networking flavor (graphs, packet data, routing tables) but the algorithmic depth felt like mid-tier LeetCode. If you've done 50-100 mediums you'll be fine. Don't skip graph basics, DFS/BFS came up twice across my rounds.
I did end up moving to the onsite after this. Total time from OA invite to phone screen was about 3 weeks. Cisco's recruiting pace is slower than startups but they actually communicate, which I appreciated as a new grad because the ghosting elsewhere has been brutal.
Happy to answer questions about specific questions if it helps anyone.