A chief engineer reached out to me on LinkedIn because he noticed I lived in the area at the time and was part of a local PHP programming group. He had a Skype interview with me that went well and asked me to come in for an in-person interview. He had me sit down and wait for a few minutes for the CTO to arrive. I had a white board test. I felt I did really well in some areas, especially SQL, and not as well in other areas. The CTO was, overall, friendly, but felt a little bit disconnected (perhaps a little bit tired or worn out from interviewing). He mentioned that he had started programming when he was really young, and nobody took him seriously back then, and had some respect for self-starters. Despite this, my impression was that enterprise experience was more important to him than project experience because I have a ton of project and work-experience at the time, but little enterprise, or in-person experience, as most of my career I've worked as a freelancer, and I don't have a college degree. The CTO said I didn't seem senior enough for a senior role, and only had 4 years experience, which puzzled me, because my resume said 10 years experience, which was accurate. I think he either didn't read all of it or didn't recognize my early project experience with simpler HTML and CSS web design as being countable. They may have felt that way because they asked me one or two questions that should have been no-brainers, but that I failed when was put on the spot, and later regretted, because I knew them and they were simple... things I would have Googled while working from home and remembered in 2 seconds, but wasn't able to recall by memorization off the top of my head. I showed them a lot of my Ruby on Rails experience, which they seemed to find interesting, but ultimately, I think they chose not to use Rails, and focus more on PHP, at least at that time. I went in attempting to sell myself on Rails, but I believe I could have done better if I had focused on my PHP experience. Also, at the end of the interview, I didn't have any questions mentally prepared for them, which it would have been a great idea to have prepared. This was the first company I interviewed with in my job search last year and I think I would have done better had I been more experienced at interviewing. I ended up getting a higher paying job in Utah, and being happier with my decision to live in Utah than Idaho, so in retrospect, it was good that I wasn't offered the job at Vynyl. I think had I received the job, my talent wouldn't have been rewarded because it wasn't fully recognized in the interview. They didn't send me a coding challenge that I could complete at home to prove competency in real-world projects.