I got a phone call from their internal recruiter within 15 minutes of sending in my resume. We hit it off. I heard a lot about the company and the recruiter really did a great job throughout the process being enthusiastic about LVT, and enthusiastic about me. The job I applied for was Sr. Web Developer. It required "Experience or knowledge of Rust". I am very experienced with my current technology stack (15+ years), a huge Rust enthusiast, and the prospect of moving into Rust development full-time was a great initial selling point for me. With my background I was worried I was too qualified for the job. The recruiter helped me feel at ease. They are growing, they need to add people with experience, especially with scaling a department and technologies. Seemed to be a perfect fit, so I bit. Not so fast. In the first online interview the hiring director said they are growing, but figures he could manage up to 200 (sic) direct reports. I literally laughed the first time, I thought he was joking. It came up several other times. I later requested a meeting with the CTO. He's totally awesome! He organically mentioned several of the Amazon Leadership Principals without realizing it. I wanted in. Technical Challenge. There was a technical challenge project that ended up being a simple Rust/Actix/Seed back-end and front-end pairing, linked via a simple CRUD. I told the hiring director it seemed too simple, and he basically said, "then just focus on the front-end, it's just to evaluate your basic Rust proficiency, and it will give us confidence you know your way around it." He also said they moved from Seed to React, and knowing that I never focused on the Seed part. There was close to zero pressure doing this project. It was pieced together from a number of existing open-source and official example projects. They did downplay the coding challenge, which I met with grace, considering my availability. So I had fun with it, jokes in the code, etc. In-Person Interview. During the in-person meeting nobody asked about the project. My UI was put on screen for a few moments, but I have no idea what they thought of it. No code, no conversation. I just briefly summarized that it was really easy cause all the code was already there in associated repos and so I took that and replicated and commented where I found it. I spent more time fiddling with a basic (non-Seed) UI then compiling Rust. The only novel thing you have to do is embrace Actix and implemented a mutexed IndexMap for state sync between threads. I thought the in-person meeting went well at first. I was hoping the "startup" energy would continue through the interview. The other developers weren't super social, half didn't bother attending, one yawned throughout. I had to ask midway through if everybody was happy with hiring a new person, and there was a resounding 'No'. What??!? I asked about how the teams where formed, who does what, what everyone is excited about moving forward, what their work-flow looks like. This department has growing pains. Major. They didn't ask me a single Rust question throughout the entire process. I did mention (for the 4th overall time) that I haven't shipped any production Rust before. Results. I got a phone call the next day. I wasn't offered the job. I contemplated where I went wrong. The recruiter and I chatted for a bit afterwords --it was great! I messaged the hiring director and he was less than transparent about the reasoning, just that the decision was complex. But said he was happy with it. I congratulated them. I did end up finding out the reasons. Apparently (1) I wanted to be a manager. (2) I didn't have enough Rust experience. Neither was true. So wow, what a big waste of everyone's time. Summary. I do like LVT as a whole, and I am excited about their product moving forward. It is evident they are experiencing growing pains at the moment. Departments and seasoned employees will need to show strength with the changes that is coming their way. It's a classic tale. I don't believe this particular department at LVT is willing to get out of their comfort zone. That said, I hope my critical comments age poorly. Go Department! Go LVT!