> Is it really asking so much to get a "We decided not to hire you at this time" email? Without that, you don't know if they decided to skip you, or if you're still in process because the company's hiring process moves at a glacial pace.

The answer is often a mix of this. Usually a company will have 3-5 candidates for an opening. Of those, 2 are usually not right personality/culture wise, 2 will be good but maybe slightly mismatched (i.e. you need a senior Rails developer and they're a senior Java developer with some Rails knowledge), and 1 will be really good and probably take a job elsewhere.

Companies never want to turn people away, because there's a good chance you extend an offer to the 1 good guy, dance with him for a couple weeks over salary/benefits, then find out he accepted an offer elsewhere. So they go back to the stack of "maybe" resumes; though by this point yours could be at the bottom of the stack and they never get back to you.

Whenever hiring frustrates you, realize that recruiters (and HR in general) are not staffed by people who think about the big picture. I don't necessarily mean that as an insult -- the HR function simply requires someone who doesn't think too much about the reasons behind what they do and follows policy to the letter (this is how companies keep from getting sued). Add to this that pretty much every request is urgent, so they're very interrupt-driven in trying to get people in the door and service any additional open requests.