An ITT employee told me ITT was hiring folks to do embedded f/w development in C#/C++/C (my area of expertise). The employee forwarded my information to HR, who sent me a posting for a Senior S/W Engineer. The job description wanted someone to lead an engineering team and to have extensive Full Stack Web Development experience. I said, “I was not qualified for nor desirous of this type of a lead role and although I’d certainly welcome the opportunity to develop web-based talents, I would not be able to ‘hit the ground running’ if such abilities were needed upon initial employment.” I was told my current technical and leadership skills were sufficient. I met with two HR representatives via Zoom to see how well I’d fit in with the ITT culture. I was impressed with the 2 individuals, who were professional and made me feel at ease. I passed that part of the interview process. The technical interview consisted of a take-home coding exercise in which I had about 5 days to complete and upload to GitHub. Also, just before my interview, I was to be sent some C# code in which I was to do a code review with a Junior Engineer (JE). During my 2-hour technical interview (again via Zoom), I met with three engineers, two highly experienced and the JE. The take-home exercise was a UI project that was to display information obtained from various web services (i.e., local weather, random images and quotes, etc.). The exercise included a half dozen stretch goals, all of which I incorporated. I was told I could use my “favorite and familiar work environment.” I choose VS 2019, creating a WPF MVVM project. When I received the code from the JE to review, it was a full-stack web project. Some of the code was written in C# while the rest was using HTML, CSS, JS, VUE, and MySQL, most outside the scope of my knowledge. I emailed the Lead Technical Interviewer (LTI) saying, “I could review the C# code, but I don’t feel I would do a suitable job of providing meaningful feedback to the junior engineer concerning the entirety of the project.” I was told to “do what I could.” During the interview, I walked through my take-home exercise code. It wasn’t until the very end that I realize I had incorrectly assumed that my interviewers had downloaded, pursued and run the code. I also spent time providing my review of the JE’s C# code. I found all 3 of my interviewers to be friendly, competent and knowledgeable, including the JE. Even when they questioned a design decision or I struggled articulating an answer, I was never made to feel inadequate or inferior. I received an email from the LTI the next morning indicating that they “have decided to proceed with other candidates for this position.” He offered the following feedback: • They wanted the take-home exercise to be web-based, not application-based (WPF). He did have to admit that was not explicitly specified in the instructions. • They felt I was too mellow and didn’t exert authority. Unfortunately, that is who I am. • I was told that even though I had little to no web development experience, they expected me to do research in those subjects in the time I was given to review the JE’s code (just a few hours) in order to provide some feedback in those areas. • They would have liked to have seen the development process of my take-home project via GIT history, though he did acknowledge that was never expressed as a requirement or desire. • They didn’t feel I showed them I was ready to jump right into any of their current projects. The only non-negative thing he said (that I wrote down) was that they felt the code from my take-home exercise was clean and easy to follow. At the time, I believed their rejection was justified; I was not ready to jump in and quickly be productive in any of their current (web-based) projects. However, I thought I had made it clear in the screening interview what my strengths and weaknesses were and what I could and couldn’t instantly bring to the table. The reasons given for rejecting me were things they should have already been aware of. I asked the LTI about this and he said they thought maybe I was underselling myself and they wanted to find out for themselves what my capabilities really were. Since I did spend quite a bit of time preparing for the interviews (~30 hours) and completing the take-home exercise (~40 hours), I did feel ITT unnecessarily wasted my time (and most likely theirs as well). Although I enjoyed my interactions with all of the ITT employees I encountered, ultimately, I felt there was a deficiency in clear communication and expectations by ITT. I was negatively assessed for unfulfilled assignments that were poorly expressed and for unmet expectations that were kept silent. And apparently ITT didn’t trust me when told them what my capabilities were and were not. I only hope this is not indicative of the way ITT treats its employees, partners, and customers.