I found the job on Indeed and applied online. A week later, I was contacted by someone who asked me to write a program in Java for them. The specification was extremely vague, so I contacted them and asked for clarification. They provided a very basic clarification. I wrote the program and sent it to them. Then, they arranged a telephone interview. We discussed my solution to the problem, and then they asked me some Java-related questions. Then, they informed me that they hadn't decided yet if they were going to hire any more developers (they had already hired some), so they needed to discuss it first, before getting back to me. Five minutes later, I received an email saying that I did well and they were going to offer me a face-to-face interview anyway, hoping that nothing would change in the meantime. A week before the interview I contacted them again, asking them to confirm the interview, because if they were not going to hire someone there was no point in me travelling to their location (an eight hour journey to get there and back.) He said 'sure, the interview is on.' I went there, where I had to pass 15 test cases in Java. I felt lucky because the tests were pretty easy. I had tackled such problems in Java plenty of times in the past, so I had no trouble passing the tests. Once the tests were over, the guy said again that he would have to discuss this with his superior, because they were not sure that they had enough space to hire someone. Thirty minutes later, I'm on my way back home and I'm receiving an email saying that he did manage to discuss it with his superiors and they were not going to hire me. He was confident that with my coding skills I would find a job easily, and hoped that my journey back home wouldn't be "too painful for me." (verbatim)
