I have always heard that DirectI was a good place to work with really smart people around to work. The HR had approached me for the position and after going through the profile, I had applied for it. The product that I applied for was their Zeta product which dealt with meal vouchers. Based on the product for which I was being interviewed for, my expectation out of the interview was that it would be more around architecture design, dispatch to consumers, internal modules which talk to each other etc but the interviewer gave a question which was totally unrelated to the product which was in question. I wasn't really sure how it would help in gauging my strengths. After the interview, the HR said that I wasn't selected but there was no proper reasons mentioned for the rejection or what exactly they are looking out for. It was a bland experience for me but then again DirectI takes people who are really good at algorithms and problem solving and I wasn't upto the mark there.

I must state first I did not complete the interview process. So I was not offered a job but was pushed to next round which I declined. The phone screen was 2 hour long and included technical, analytical and coding questions. The interview was scheduled only on thursday evenings so if a particular date was not good, you had to wait 1 whole week to get to the next round. That part was frustrating. The HR sent links to companies web site but did not give any phone introduction of the job position or what role were they looking to fit me into. I was also sent a link to the companies programming contest site and asked to pick any of the hard/hardest problem categories and code it. Unfortunately there were only 2 problems I could choose from and one of them was a NP complete problem. The coding and tests took me 3 nights to complete since I was still in my day job. Here itself I was a bit interested since I like a companys focus on programming basics. But knowing NP complete solutions is a bit much. The phone screen involved questions on algo, data structures and programming. It began with a big discussion on past experience. - Nth fibonacci number -- iterative - Find least common ancestor in a tree with back links to parents - Speed, distance analytical question - Java reference basics - Java string basics - Argue why you need interfaces - Multi threaded synchronization in java The questions although on the basics were involved and went into details. It took a little more than 2 hrs to get through.