I had phone screening and all was good, I understood exactly what needs to be done, and knew I could do faster than they expect. Next week I was contacted again. The onsite interview was scheduled 3-4 days ahead. It should last 4+ hours on average. I have spent evening preparing for the interview. The whole thing for me including driving should be around 6 hours -- so I have allocated all day for that interview. Spent 50+ minutes driving to their site in the morning traffic. When I was getting to parking lot 15 min before the interview I got a phone call and was told that they hired someone and I can just go home. I found that to be really rude on their side. I lost pretty much whole day because of that. At least they could have interview me and say no. While everyone I spoke with appear to be nice on phone, I have strong feeling that this company does not care about people at all. While this is negative experience I am glad that I learned how they treat people right away. Could me much worse if I had to learn this while working at this firm.

The first round of my interview with the HR went well, and that person was able to inform me of many exciting facts about CognitiveScale. I felt like a potential match. The second round with a tech lead was a little bit unexpected. For some reasons, he tried to make me talk about software design situations I had never experienced before as a college student. I did not advertise anything related on my resume, or in my previous round interview. Although I attempted to cue him several times that I was not an expert in these industry-oriented problems but happy to learn more, he kept digging into the same problem deeper and deeper, until I had no idea how to respond. Overall they are nice people, and I'm sure they will figure out a better interviewing schema for different types of candidates that better align with their position requirements.