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Thursday, August 2, 2012

[OFF] How I almost screwed Directi

Been over a year since I have felt this good. Yeah, precise, and to the point!

Being ditched was one of the worst experiences I have ever had. Probably, this fills me up with a sense of redemption rather than some achievement.

People ask Does Linux Pay? Today, I would say it does!


Four rounds of Directi and the end is all that matters. NIT Durgapur has proved to be the better choice indeed. Thanks to all the guys who encouraged me for this.

The Directi guys came around 4 pm on the fateful day and gave a wonderful presentation, where they announced the package of 9+ lpa. It was however known, to all those appearing. A total of 222 students appeared for the first round. It involved 30 questions, MCQ with only one answer being correct of the 5 options. Each paper had a unique code, where the orders of the questions and the choices were randomly arranged. (Thus copying was out of the question, according to the HR!) We were 30 minutes, scaled down from 45 that they had decided initially, to raise the standard of the test. I answered 26 of them (I assume one or two were incorrect though) and that saw me through to the next round.

They selected 43 students for the next round. The next round was a coding round where we had to program, in any language of our choice, whatever they had in store for us. They supplied us with python, ruby and java documentations. The problem was one where we had to find the largest file in the current folder and implement some of the functionalities of the tail program. Precisely, we had to implement tail -n and tail -f. We were given 3 hours. I was done with all except the "-f" part in about an hour. The last two hours, I digged up and implement inotify.

Six students were shortlisted for the interview the next morning. We and the HRs were present punctually (surprisingly!). The recruiter picked me up for the first interview. Starting informally, we quickly progressed to technical questions from Networking, OS and DBMS. I was very scratchy in the interview, screwed up DBMS (what was 3NF again?) , said that the total computers connected to a network would be limited by the IPv4 protocol (2^32-1, after which he made me remember about NAT pretty soon) and more such stupidity continued for half-an-hour.

Again, surprisingly, I was shortlisted for the second round of interviews! The next interview was all about Linux, how the system boots in as much detail as I could give, system calls and some stuff on Networking (I remember talking about nmap, telnet, port scanning, traceroute, thus ICMP, etc.).

After I was done, the next 20 minutes was a pot-boiler for the three of us, who appeared in the second round. At 2 p.m., the recruiters comes out and shakes my hand! Two are selected and the rest as they say, is history.... (could not resist adding that cliche!).

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