Last year a large well-known company contacted me, unsolicited, and said they were interested in hiring a Django committer (which I am), and asking me to apply to work for them. Then they put me in the "prove you can write basic code" phone screen bucket, and I walked away. If they're going to waste my time and the screener's time on something they already know -- given why they're reaching out to me -- then I'm going to reasonably conclude they're not a company worth working for.
Would you then label me as unable to code and "looking for an escape"? Or is it possible there's just more to the story than you happen to know? Because that is not the only example I have of this kind of thing.
That sounds like a serious miscommunication between the person who originally reached out to you, and the person doing the interviewing.
I've interviewed several candidates, and sometimes there's been a time crunch, and I didn't do more than read their resume and do a quick google search to make sure they haven't recently escaped from a federal penitentiary or something. Perhaps your interviewers didn't know your prior qualifications, or that you were meant to have been fast-tracked past the "has a pulse" section of the interview?
It's likely that a serious mistake by the candidate leads the company to end the interview process. Why then should I, as the candidate, not apply the same standard to them?
Would you then label me as unable to code and "looking for an escape"? Or is it possible there's just more to the story than you happen to know? Because that is not the only example I have of this kind of thing.