Was contacted by a person doing recruitment, who was interested in some of the work I was doing. We had some email conversations about the research (the person was knowledgeable, so not a standard recruiter, which was nice), and a phone interview with their cybersecurity team lead was arranged, despite knowing that I wasn't a cybersecurity analyst. The phone interview went well, very person person, and of course, it was accepted that I did not know the cybersecurity stuff (my research is useful to cybersecurity people but I am not a cybersecurity person per se). That person decided I wasn't a fit enough, and my contact was frustrated since he was sure my skillset was valuable to them but none of their current reqs fit my set.

He set up another phone interview with a different group, and that went well since they were more flexible. They flew me out for a series of interviews with members of the team and the government managers, and apparently I passed, but we couldn't agree on salary. They said they wanted me, so I'm counting that as an offer, but unfortunately, they couldn't pay me an equitable salary.

So we parted on good terms. I would recommend this company, these groups doing cybersecurity, to anyone interested. It was a nice group of people, laid back and friendly, and not like the corporate/retail s/w world in my experience, especially since they were more concerned about finding new ways to do things and try new things, not just how to maximize profit or create little mini-empires. :) I wouldn't have hesitated to work for them if we could have agreed on salary, and feel it would have been a great experience.

Mainly just a discussion of my research work, but they did ask some of the usual silly coding/architecture questions that one doesn't remember typically unless you just graduated with a C.S degree or are actually doing work in that area. One, how does some function in C that takes any arguments know the type of the passed argument. Two, explain how a browser works.