I spoke to you at length and then your cofounder at length. Then it turns out that you don't actually have any immediate need to fill the role but you "might" have a need in the next 30 to 90 days. I pretty much gathered that you basically subcontract.
I'm sorry you felt your time was wasted; we do not aim to do that at any point in the process (it wastes our time, too! :D). We are a kubernetes consulting and DevOps-as-a-Service shop, and some amount of our demand's final materialization is unpredictable. We take pains to mention that in the beginning but, if we didn't, that's on us and I'll make sure we don't miss that again - thank you for bringing that to my attention.
I don't know your situation, but it's highly likely we had a significant influx of demand that suddenly softened, and we had to back-off on the hiring. Or, perhaps also likely, we hired someone that more closely matched the position and needed to pause the search (we have 3 people starting on Monday, Feb 5, for example; we've hit our quota of less experienced Kube experts and have re-focused on people with extensive cloud production kube experience).
As a profitable but bootstrapped firm that has (yet!) to lay off people due to underwork, we strongly bias against pre-emptive hiring.
I wish you the best of luck in your career, and if you are still looking, in your search.
-- Matt
Except that I replied in response to a "who's hiring" thread and the interviews followed very close to my responding. So why would you even be posting that you are hiring if you had "demand that suddenly softened"?
That being said, a lot of the folks I spoke with seemed pretty sharp. YMMV.
Although we strive to hire everyone who reaches the final stages (it's super time consuming for everyone, you and the team!), ultimately we have to turn away people who are awesome but aren't a perfect fit (at our teeny-tiny size back in [time redacted] when you interviewed, we were even pickier than we are now; I wouldn't read too much into our decision to not move forward).
We've made a lot of changes in our process since you spoke with us and I hope we're more communicative - to the best of our ability - in our process. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors!
-- Matt