i talked with a hiring manager, and a recruiter. they asked me about my motivation to apply, my background, and about photonic computing at psiquantum and more generally. they wanted to know why i wanted to switch from my current role.

It was initially quick and exciting, I applied, heard from the recruiter, met the hiring manager, and had a panel interview all within a month. Then it became slow and incoherent after the panel interview. HM mentioned I'd hear back quickly but after three weeks of not hearing back I decided to email the recruiter. The recruiter never responded to my email. Instead, I got an email a few days later about an interview with a VP and I accepted. We met a few days later and it was a good interview, we were aligned on the role. A few days later I got an email saying the team is happy to have me and the final stage is a background and reference checks. The reference checks outed me at work and people were excited for me at work. I was even able to see the references on their platform, they were very kind, the best part of this experience was being able to see what my current colleagues said about me. Almost another three weeks after reference and background checks I got an email saying that they are unable to hire me due to some lack of consensus. This experience left me feeling encouraged to keep applying to roles at psiquantum, but after several more poor experiences, luckily not lasting several months like this one, I decided to stop applying to psiquantum.