August 2025, Canada. Recruiting agency promoted me to apply for Senior firmware engineer position, even though l'm looking for mid position (almost 5 years exp) l decided to give it a shot. l wrote a cover letter and received a test task. I was working on it hard and spent over 35 hours. Make it clean, reasonable and self-educating without external help. After communicating company's PM I got invited to offline interview. From my side, interview felt interesting and I enjoyed questions. In the same time, I didn't provide good enough answers for senior position and made it clear for my recruiting agent. My weakness were: 1. English isn't my first language and I had some troubles with understanding one of interviewers so I had to re-ask him every question, sometimes more than once. It felt awkward. 2. After failing one of the questions I got nervous and couldn't phrase proper replies and thoughts. Even worse l started forgetting words 3. I failed all the physics questions I enjoyed the interview and was ready to face rejection. Even though I knew they hire different people for different levels. But reply I've got exceeded all my expectations. Basically I got called a cheater that couldn't write this project by my own and was "relying on external support like Ai to help you through the project they sent you." When company blames you for cheating out of nowhere is frustrating.