I too was a victim of the NYT interview process. I went through all the rounds: 8 in total. I enjoyed meeting everyone in the interviews. The only negative was the recruiter, who was late/missed meetings. Then, they strung me along for over two weeks while it was clear they were interviewing someone else and thinking they wanted to hire that person instead. I kept being told, we are very excited about you as a candidate and hope you’ll wait to hear back from us. I stupidly thought I was getting an offer, but now in hindsight they just needed more time to finish interviewing someone else. The recruiter even lied and said that they had a lot of decision makers call out sick one week (to buy themselves more time). Then, to add insult to injury, after all those weeks of waiting … I got a form rejection email. Not even personalized. I asked for feedback and never heard back. Just a horrible process that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.