I applied for two positions online. I received an email from HR to set up an initial phone screen. A few days later, an engineer called back at the appointed time, and we chatted for half an hour or so.

A few days after that, HR called to say that they didn't think I was a fit for that particular position, but that they had forwarded my resume to another department. I repeated the process with a new engineer for a QA lead position. He asked a lot of questions about general QA practices, time management, networking, Linux, and circuit board components.

They then called back to set up a 4-hour interview at F5's Seattle office.

The interview consisted of a series of 5 45-minute interviews with various team members. Some of the interviews were by phone to off-site locations. I met with 3 engineers and two managers. They mostly asked me to tell stories about various things I had done in the past (e.g., test systems I'd designed, etc.). However, one of the engineers had a couple of great questions in which he described situations where something was not working and he wanted me to troubleshoot it. For example, two computers are connected by two network cables on a switch, but neither of them can ping the other – what could be wrong?

The two managers were not very technical, and unfortunately, they did not communicate the purpose of their groups very well. In particular, I did not connect very well with the hiring manager, although I'm fairly confident that I passed the technical aspects of the interviews.

HR said that they would call me with a yes-or-no answer the following week. Two weeks later, I received an email (nicely worded) that said that the manager had chosen somebody else for this job.

Describe a situation where you had a difficult situation with your boss, and what did you do about it?