What confuses me is why he didn't ask them their opinion. Why didn't he say: At this point, I'm concerned I'm not a fit for your organization. Much of my time

What confuses me is why he didn't ask them their opinion. Why didn't he say: At this point, I'm concerned I'm not a fit for your organization. Much of my time has been spent enhancing my business knowledge in lieu of coding, and that doesn't appear to be valued for this position. I don't work on open source projects and my free time is spent broadening other horizons, not coding. Do you still think I'm a good fit for this position? Even if he wasn't technical enough for their coding position, maybe there was another position - PM, team lead, consultant, etc. - that he would have been hired for. I'll may get flamed for this, but I see a guy who spent who got insecure about his technical skills for a heavy coding job he shouldn't have applied to (or been recommended for). I see this all the time. This doesn't mean you can't provide value if you're not a coding ninja; I'm not, yet think I do a pretty good job of it. But I also don't compete with recent CS grads for coding jobs at Google.