A Slack recruiter reached out to me. I've never been a Data Infra Engineer and haven't used like half of the technologies listed in the JD. At no point did I suggest I had experience with them either and my resume does not mention them. I told the recruiter that while I'd certainly like to work more in Data, I don't have the relevant experience and would probably be a better fit for an SRE, DevOps, Infra, or Security role . The recruiter insisted that my experience was ok and that they were actually looking for someone with my experience, despite the requirements in the JD. The recruiter said that my experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, Python, and Security would be helpful for the team and they have the Data bases covered already. I said I wasn't sure, given that the last time a company told me that, they told me "we want someone with more Data experience" after I interviewed, wasting hours of my *unpaid* time for something that was already known before even the first phone call. Given the recruiter's affirmations, I agreed to hop on a call with the hiring manager. The recruiter asked me to prepare some stories about scale I've worked on. The call with the hiring manager started out rough. I was on the Zoom call waiting and the hiring manager was a few minutes late. A few minutes is no big deal, but a minute after joining, the hiring manager says "we only have 25 minutes left", which came off a bit er, strange, given we literally just started the call. The hiring manager's tone did not seem particularly interested or engaged and they mentioned the time several more times, a frequency I've never previously experienced, especially not for such a short call. During their intro they said they wanted someone "very senior" and put a lot of emphasis on that and looked at me with eyebrows raised, seemingly questioning my experience. The hiring manager did not ask me any technical questions what-so-ever, and only asked me basic questions the recruiter had already asked. Once again, I did not pretend I have experience with the technologies listed and plainly stated what I did have experience with. We only got into some technical areas because *I* asked about them and was trying to understand how I would fit. The hiring manager said they don't work with Kubernetes directly and so wouldn't need to know the API, which seemed to contradict what the recruiter said about my useful experience and put into further question the fit. We talked about Airflow and RBAC which I have worked with before and then I asked a few questions and that was it. I received a rejection shortly after saying I didn't have enough depth with data infra... even though that was something we both already knew and, to repeat, I was not asked any technical questions, so there shouldn't really have been any new information from that interview or really anything beyond my resume. I'm not sure why I was asked to interview for a role that wasn't a fit with a hiring manager that didn't think I was a fit from the very beginning... I guess they wanted to test the waters, but they wasted my unpaid time in doing so... The hiring manager also said I didn't have an interest, which was just blatantly false -- if that were true, I wouldn't have interviewed at all... I had also repeatedly said I had wanted to work in this subdomain for a few years and have even went out of my way to go to meet-ups and helped teams in this subdomain before. I just didn't think I was qualified. I replied to the rejection from the recruiter that I had predicted this exact scenario to them and that I wanted to interview for other roles that I had previously said would be a better fit. The recruiter did not respond. We talked a lot about values, but insisting candidates interview for roles neither they nor the hiring manager thinks they're a fit for and then refusing to let them interview for better fit roles seems to contradict some of those.