Cisco Software Engineer I interview questions

Technical Rounds: First round they asked me puzzles of finding the number of trails needed to find defective piece in given set of balls, if a magical pond with balls in it doubling every day fills pond in 13 days, on which day it will be filled 1/4th, in a horse race of 5 horses at a time, how many trails are needed to get the top 3 horses out of 25 horses and so on of these types. Programming was pgms on liked list like reversing linked list, and some pgms on hashes. He told me to write in java if possible. I used python as it was easier. Second round he asked me to explain difference between switches and routers, explain ARP, write a pgm to find max consecutive one's n zero's equal in number present in the given binary string, some simple puzzles were written on board, he told me to solve them. Managerial round: Third round he asked me to tell any one thing that makes me stand out of crowd in my department (mine was CSE) and explain that thing in detail. Also asked whether i was interested in pursuing higher studies. (Always tell NO for obvious reasons :p ) HR round: This was as usual, family background, strength n weakness about you. He also asked how many times i have been rejected after reaching till HR round and also how many companies i attended before this.

Write pseudo code for your favorite sorting algorithm. Write a method that determines whether a number is prime.