I interviewed with Cisco through a recruiting agency. After meeting with the agency I met with a manager at Cisco for a quick 30 minute interview. They needed a Data DevOps Engineer to support their Elasticsearch cluster and it sounded perfect for me because I have extensive experience with ELK and DevOps. It was a very rushed interview but I quickly described my experience with complicated ELK administration tasks. It became obvious that the interviewers experience with Elastic was very limited, but I hoped that after the call he'd just google the parts he didn't have experience with. I really enjoyed talking to them about their projects and was very excited about the position and the next steps. I was completely shocked when I was told the next day that they wouldn't be going forward with the interview process, and was insulted by their feedback as none of it accurately reflected my experience. I'm a woman and he used words like "passionate" and "loves Elasticsearch" but then claimed I didn't understand the data structure because he didn't understand when I explained how mappings were related to searches. He said my scripting knowledge was limited, but I have 17 years of professional experience writing scripts in almost a dozen languages and he only asked one scripting question - list off as many Python packages as you can in one minute, which has to be the worst way to confirm someone can write a script that I can possibly think of. He didn't include any information on the scripts I told him about that I wrote solely on my own, including one that involved advanced Elasticsearch and mathematical knowledge. He also stated I was a SME in DevOps for my team, when what I actually told him was that I was the SME in DevOps for an entire fortune 100 company. It felt like he couldn't believe a woman had achieved that level of knowledge and decided to diminish it down to a team level. He also claimed I didn't know anything about logstash/ingest when I described to him in detail at least four different ways of ingesting into Elasticsearch. The weirdest part of the feedback though was that he said I didn't understand Elastic searches when I described to him around five different ways to do searches and how a query was structured. I have almost 10 years of experience with Elastic searches, and 17 years with SQL which is fairly similar. I had told him that I was so experienced and trusted that I was the escalation contact for a few US Gov Departments at my last position, as incorrect search data on these can result in legal charges for the company. He also incorrectly stated the size of the last cluster I supported to the point that the math was completely incorrect and just not possible with those specs. He made it sound in the feedback that all I knew how to do was some limited use of the API, restore from snapshots, and describe red-green states, which is very far from the truth. He took everything I said, twisted it around, and wrote it up to make me look as dumb as possible. Instead of giving me a fair evaluation he was clearly just collecting a list for why they could turn me down. In the end it felt like they purposefully and maliciously bombed my interview and made up fake reasons for why I wasn't qualified, and I can only assume it's because I'm a woman. Maybe they are doing fake interviews so they can just hire H-1Bs for cheaper, or they had a friend they wanted to give the job to? It felt like a complete waste of my time and was one of the worst interviewing experiences I've had in my 20 year career.