I received an email from MIT Lincoln Lab HR informing me about their desire to interview me for a position. The email exchange was slow, taking place over several weeks. I was initially contacted in July, and it took August to finally schedule a date for September. They arranged to fly me from my location to Boston and accommodate me at a nearby hotel.
I arrived early morning ready to spend at least half the day interviewing. I first met with an HR representative who asked me some preliminary questions and then walked me to Group 95. I interviewed with five employees from Group 95 on a 1:1 basis, including a manager, a contractor, and a recent graduate. They all detailed the nature of their work, asked me questions about past engineering experiences in college, and asked some behavioral questions. My last interview occurred with two people, and I was challenged to walk through on a whiteboard how I would program a calculator. They knew programming was outside my range of knowledge, but the purpose was to see how I would think about the problem.
As this ended, I was escorted back to the HR representative for a debriefing. I was told that I would hear back anywhere from a window of a few days to a few weeks and that they would look into my references if the Group was interested in hiring me.
No one contacted me for weeks, so I decided to call the HR representative, and I received an email from him the next day declining my candidacy.