CareerCup - Better Interviews, Better Careers

Nice to see techwoman in action :)

Thanks Zeeshan! :-)

Just an opinion ... I think that people who start off by giving an array as a data structure to store the coefficients may never have actually implemented all or part of a symbolic math package. They are just giving a representation that is the "natural" thing they think about when they think about differentiation, because the way it is taught in ... See Morecalculus typically does not take computational considerations into account. You learn the definition, you use it to prove some rules (one typically being polynomials with positive integerl exponents), and then you learn some other rules. An array is not the best data structure for the reasons given in the interview, but it is something that is likely to come to mind during an interview, because time is limited, and the interviewee is stressed.

But this calls into question what are the best things to teach people who are interested in becoming software engineers. If in a software engineering project class, they are given parts of a symbolic math package to implement, is this the best project? Why not a text editor, web browser, web crawler, spam detector, etc? And for those who develop their own projects, what are the best projects to work on? Because the field of software engineering is so wide, it is difficult to educate students (or other newcomers) in such a way that they would be able to reliably give the best answer for a majority of interview questions.