Maybe you didnt STAR hard enough to be considered a dedicated, fanatic cog :)

When I saw they had like 14 principles I was like ‘yeah, peace out’. I can deal with 3-5, but 14? You can’t see the forest for the trees.

The scary thing is that I actually agree with almost all of their principles, I've memorized my answers for each one (with overlap), I can do quite a few BFS graph problems and implement an LRU cache accurately... I can do data modeling and talk about all of the non functional requirements of distributed systems.... and still I get denied :D

Oh well! Guess it will be remote work at a normal company for me then.