I was reached out by a Staffing agency for this full time permanent job. I found a lot of discrepancies in the position description so tried to clear everything. Job posting was really very ambiguous - they wanted a Senior level Java/J2EE person who is not running away from coding and good in application architecture area with some 10 years of experience and if possible some 3 years of financial services background. After sending my resume and cover letter to DTCC, i come to know that i need to appear in two online tests-Java1.5 and JEE6. The online tests were from IKM and very good tests. Each test was around 2:15 to 2:30 minutes and had a provision of negative marking. In fact if you skip the question then also it will have negative marking. More over each test was having multiple answers(check box) but it won't tell you how many are correct. If somebody try to select anything from the exam screen the test will be abandoned, so one has to do it honestly. I did it well and come to know scored some where like 78% and 85% on both the tests. The next round was telephonic interview after 4 days. It seems the interviewer was reading the questions and had the answers from a paper/computer. He never asked me any cross questions and this interview also went really well as in that one hour i provided a very detailed answers to his questions with extra examples etc...Questions were easy like "difference between interface and abstract class", three pillars of OOP etc... Then i was called for the face to face interview in the wall street office. I met HR for around 20 minutes where she collected the employment background check form and asked me few other questions like why you want to leave your current job and join DTCC etc... HR confessed that the job specification is poorly written and it is confusing the candidates in terms of what DTCC is looking for - Developer, Sr. Developer, Lead Developer or Architect. Then i had a panel interview for 90 minutes - one person attending it on video conference from Tempa, FL. They tried to make video conferencing to work for around 10 minutes and then gave up. Interviewers were friendly. Only issue was that the two interviewers who were in front of me were not from java background-they were mainframe. I tried to be diplomatic as i have read that a java person should not constantly tell the mainframe folks that we will do a rewrite of the mainframe components. The gentleman on the phone(because VC didn't worked) was knowing java but at the superficial high level(very much text book knowledge as he was from educational services domain). The questions were fairly high level and it doesn't sound that they are doing interesting work in the cutting edge technologies. Moreover mainframe folks were bit adamant in terms of ideas to change the systems to open systems and latest industry standards. It was more of a discussion rather than technical interview which was sort of disappointing to me. It was for the ADM department and what i can find out that it was heavy messaging and too much traffic in the production they are dealing with. Not much of the front end or web based applications. They didn't ask design and architecture questions-just some strategy questions(only two in number). Later after one day i come to know from the agency that they are very happy and she asked for professional references. After 5 days i come to know that i am not selected reason- they want a high level abstract architect not an architect who has come from the development background. What is a bluster??? Why did they asked for online tests at the very first place. My overall 15 hours of efforts are wasted. It's the final interview which was fatal for me as they didn't asked any thing related to the person they were recruiting for? Why they had a wrong description of the position at first place. It's waste of everybody's time. Overall i was there in their office for 2:30 hours-it's a very laid back and relaxed place where people are working in relaxed environment.It's completely IBM shop and full of slow and lengthy processes. Computers, cubicals, doors and everything was very old and this place was looking at least 20 years behind from rest of the Wall street firms. Good amount of folks who are working here are in their late 40s or mid 50s and quite old fashioned. Future candidates, make sure that job specification is correct then only go there. I feel this interview was already fixed.