I wish I had not wasted time on this long series of interviews. My opinion is that Prelude Research is just testing the waters. Through October and November, I had individual 30- or 45-minute interviews with five different people, culminating in e-mail negotiations with a sixth person. The last interviewer told me that he was impressed and would ask the team to move forward.
There were red flags all along. It would take days for the company to schedule interviews. Last-minute excuses ranged from a "heads-down" Web site redesign to a weeklong whole-company off-site -- all foreseeable. One interviewer mentioned that the company had tried to staff a DevOps team in the past. Another divulged, in the context of discussing Amazon Web Services account practices, that the company had once let some people go.
Despite a fast-approaching start date, negotiations stopped for several days. Had I been ghosted? The person I was negotiating with claimed that a document signing system had eaten my e-mail message, even though I had sent it directly to the person's company e-mail address, with a cc: to myself as a record.
We delayed my start date one week. After we had agreed to terms, there was another whole day with no response. The day after that, I received an e-mail indicating that needs had been "re-assessed".
All the time I had spent getting to know the company, trying the product to be able to discuss it intelligently, and then earnestly negotiating employment terms, turned out to be a waste. Prelude Research kept saying, "jump", and I foolishly kept asking "How high?"
