A senior developer applied to a fintech startup and was put through five interview rounds over twelve hours: whiteboarding, live coding, deep architecture discussions. The CTO gave him the final nod and signalled he was the pick. Then nothing. No rejection email, no update, no response to follow-ups. "They did not even have the decency to send a canned rejection email," he wrote.
Eight months passed. Out of nowhere, the same recruiter messaged him: the lead developer had quit and the company was in desperate need of a replacement. Could he come back in?
The developer, recognising the opportunity, played along. He claimed he had another offer on the table to accelerate their process. The company scrambled and scheduled a "final technical sync" with the hiring manager for 4 p.m. on a Friday.
He never showed up. He never emailed. He returned exactly the treatment they had given him.
The post clocked over 1,600 upvotes on r/recruitinghell. Commenters called it "the long game" and "the most satisfying thing I've read all week." One wrote: "You didn't burn a bridge. They burned it eight months ago. You just let them walk across the ashes first."