How to Get a Job at Directi ?

How to Get a Job at Directi?

Directi looks for smart programmers, not just people who can solve algorithms but have spent time in doing stuff other than what they were expected to in college. And of course being good with algorithms is essential. 

I studied at Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, NMIMS University, yeah you probably are hearing the name of the school for the first time, and most of the placements that happened on campus were by service based companies like Infosys and Accenture. And then there was this company Directi that we could not even dream of joining (atleast in the first and second years).

How did I know about Directi?

In my second year being a part of ACM we organized a programming competition that was hosted on CodeChef and that time me and my committee members interacted with Directi people for the first time in their Mumbai office. I was fascinated by their office and the smart and awesome people and I was also amazed by the idea of CodeChef and how it was helping the programming community in India so since then Directi became like a dream company.

ACM ICPC 2010

Since I got access to competitive programming early almost all the time in the third year was spent in preparing for ACM ICPC, I was happy to have a mentor like Pratik Tandel who used to guide and help me with the problems I could not solved. I also encouraged two of my classmates to prepare for ICPC, it was not an easy task. Anything in a college like this which does not result in improving your CGPA is considered a waste of your time, I never cared about my GPA. Coming back to ICPC, our team which was named as Aurors reached the regional and came like 35th out of 150 teams. Not a very good result, but not very bad either. But we were sad about one thing, CodeChef team had come to ICPC and said that they would give a chance for people to interview with Directi if they solved more than 2 problems. We had solved just two, so it was heart breaking still I did not lose hope. I really wanted to get into Directi.

Preparing for the Directi internship, 2011

In the third trimester of third year, we used to have a programming project and we could choose a mentor from the college or someone from the industry. If there was one guy who I knew and respected a lot and wanted him as a mentor it was Dhruv Matani. Now Dhruv till date is the most awesome guy I know, he is one of the best programmers I know, he used to teach computer science in our college some years back and was considered the best teacher ever, then he went on to write his recipe book, while doing crazy things all along. And luckily he agreed to mentor me and my friend for our third year project. Now during the time he was a mentor I paid several visits to Directi where we used to discuss the project and I used to ask him about how to get an internship at Directi. Since he liked our project (Pingu, the bot) he decided to refer me for the internship position and also helped me prepare my resume and asked me to work on competitive programming even more. I got a call from Lizanne (HR) asking me to submit my resume and two problems (to be solved on CodeChef).

It was after 4 rounds of interviews and three months that I got a call from Lizanne, that I was selected for the internship. Now trust me there is no formula of how this happened, the first three rounds were algorithmic rounds where I did above average (not very good) and the final round was the interview. The interview was also a pretty much algorithmic round but he also asked me about my interests and stuff, and I told him about the various projects I did and the various blogs I used to run then and how I used to make money through adsense and stuff. I mean I told him I started using Adsense since 10th standard, what I did not know was that Directi group had a product Media.net which was an ad network competing with Adsense. I am not sure if my blogs on Priyanka Chopra and Fashion helped me get through, but I can sure tell that the interviewer was atleast smiling when I told him to search for "priyanka chopra blog" on google and told him that the first result is the blog run by me. Yes, and out of the three algorithmic questions he asked I was able to solve two.

So essentially that's how I got into Directi (as an intern) by applying off campus. What happened next was the PPO after internship, and one year later I joined Directi full-time. This was around one year back and it was a fun filled year, now recently I put down papers at Directi to pursue my dream of running a startup Flat.to (we recently raised angel investment) and will be joining it full time at the end of June.

Being in Directi is an experience I am cherishing (at least for one more month) and will always cherish :)