After two months... Rejected
I've been in the interview/hiring process with this company for more than two months. Interviews upon interviews, calls, documents going back and forth, assignmenta, a bunch of information flowing back and forth between me and the recruiter...
Finally, a CEO interview was scheduled. One final hurdle. Been preparing for about two weeks for it. Went deeply technical, learned a bunch on new stuff, prepared the best I could...
Turns out, the CEO was on holiday. The call was... weird. He asked a bunch of seemlingly random questions, none of which were pointed at assessing my skills to do the job. My prep gone to waste completely and almost instantly. I'm not sure where his questions were going and what he was trying to asses, but throughout the call he seemed very uninterested and distant. I asked questions too - he nodded, provided constructive answers, said my questions were good. But his body language told me he's done, I'm not getting this job. After it was done I assessed my chances at about 30% of landing the job.
The next day I get a rejection email, with virtually no details as to what went wrong. My gut tells me two things. 1. I interrupted his vacation, which is why he was uninterested and didn't want to even speak, and 2. I'm not even sure the guy was actually going to give me a proper chance at all. His queations and attitude were both completely random and in no way related to the job itself.
Sometimes you cannot even prepare properly, and even if you do, there are external factors completely out of your control that influence the final decision. It sucks to waste this much time, but at least the prep served me well. It's all going into my CV onwards.