About three months later, after I'd long written them off, I got a call from them. They'd "been busy" and asked if I could come by the next day. This time, I met with several people working on the projects I'd be helping them with (mostly porting code to platforms I had a ton of experience on). Everything was looking good. Then the HR guy said something like, "you don't seem very excited." Since no talk of an offer of any kind had come up yet, I was severely tempted to remind him that, after the last time I came in, I didn't hear from them again for months.
The last thing said to me upon exiting the interview, again, all smiles and handshakes, was, "I'll give you a call tomorrow. But if you don't hear from me, give me a call."
Fuck that. From the moment I left their building, I never gave them another thought. As expected, I didn't hear a peep from them.
Employers like to complain about how hard it is to find talent, but then they behave like this. It's as much our evaluation of them as it is their evaluation of us.
I've been on the other side of it, too. Being made to interview candidates when we have absolutely no need for additional people, or for groups wildly unrelated to anything I do in the company. I wanted to tell the people, "look, you're probably never going to hear from us again because, frankly, we don't need anybody, and nobody in engineering has any idea why we're interviewing you."