while cisco is overall a great company, some of their interviewers can be very unknowledgeable and unprofessional/disrespectful. The interviewer/engineer called in 10 minutes late on a scheduled 30 minutes call, then asked questions totally unrelated to what the group is doing, drilling down on unnecessary details about tools the team is NOT using, not to mention lacking of knowledge on even the basic data structure/algorithms, and jeering and laughing throughout, and this is someone with a 'principle software engineer' title. Definitely a cut or two below top tier company. I sent in my request to withdraw my application right after the interview.
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Cisco (San Jose, CA) in Jul 2012
Interview
I was contacted by the Hiring team and then contacted over the phone by a Cisco Employee who asked me general Java Question.
On Site interivew was a 5 hour interview split over 1 hour each wherein the Engineers came ans asked me questions about Java.