Chatted with a recruiter about my skills, who promised to get back to me with a position in the next few days. Three weeks later, after multiple follow-ups, he offered to submit my application for a senior role, which I was delighted about, despite the fact they had taken so long.

I then had two in-office, ~30-minute meetings (on separate days) with managers from the team before eventually being invited in for a whole-day interview where I met with each team member. Everyone I met was nice and I think the interview was very fair, but I found the lack of communication from the recruiter to be awful, and the whole process took a -really- long time. Nearly 60 days between being put in touch with the recruiter and hearing my decision.

Most of the actual interviews were sane. I had a guy plainly admit he had just got back from holiday, was tired, and hadn't looked at my resume. I also had to spend a whole hour over lunch with the main boss, which can get a little awkward. He was super nice, but after all, we're programmers.

Worst of all, when I received my invitation to the final interview, I noticed they had casually demoted the role to which I was applying from senior to regular. I asked the recruiter via email, who said he would call me the day before my interview. He then stood me up -three- times in one day for a phone call, and we never got to discuss it.

After my interviews, I got an email telling me that they were looking for someone with more experience in X. I wasn't particularly surprised not to get the job, but I did wonder why they bothered to spend several hours interviewing me when my experience was clearly detailed on my resume (I had 0 years experience in X; there was no ambiguity).

To sum up, I'm not resentful of NR for not offering me the job, but I do feel like I had my time wasted. I had so many follow-up emails ignored, which I think is inexcusable. It takes 10 seconds to write a simple "Sorry, we're really busy, this is taking longer than expected; I'll write to you next week hopefully." Even if you're somehow able to justify ignoring applicants, I think missing several phone calls in one day is simply unacceptable.

Tell us about an interesting bug you found and fixed.