Who was there: Jerry Meredith — Security Architect, 20+ years at Global Payments. Mostly quiet, let Shah lead. Shah Mansoor — Security Architect, 3 years at Global Payments. He ran the technical questioning. Zachary Richardson Laney Dale — never showed up. How it went: No behavioral questions. No STAR method. No "tell me about a time when." Pure technical interrogation from Shah the entire time. Questions jumped from networking to CLI to Terraform to CI/CD with no clear structure. Shah interrupted frequently and didn’t always let me finish my answers. Jerry asked one question at the end about whether I preferred Azure or M365. How it ended: Shah told me directly that the questions were basic and that someone with my certs should answer them. Jerry confirmed they’re looking for depth in Azure infrastructure, not M365 security. They said the recruiter would follow up. The honest summary: It was a first-round screening that was misaligned from the start. The role needed an Azure infrastructure engineer. My background is M365 security. Nobody caught that until the last two minutes.