I have well over a decade of experience in my job. I have been with the company for a bit over a decade. I have been in my current role for almost one full decade. My boss left for another job months ago, so I have been doing that job since, which has been instrumental in our department carrying on as normal without any hiccups. HR finally posted the job, and I applied. I interviewed, and it went very well. It might have been one of the best interviews that I've ever done. I was told that several current employees applied but that the applicants were whittled down to just a few, which included me. I know for a fact that I was the only person from my small department to apply, but I have no idea who applied from other parts of the organization.
My company doesn't really promote people. They post a job and let people apply and interview. If someone within the department is selected and moves up into the job, then they call it a promotion, though I would argue that it's not a promotion if you have to apply for it. Over the months since my boss left, I just assumed that I had the job in the bag, even though I knew I would have to go through a full application and interview process. Even my department expected that the job was mine. I learned a lot of stuff about our convoluted operations that my former boss never included us on, and I started making plans for things that I wanted to do for when I moved into the new position.
About two weeks after the interviews wrapped up, I received a notice that they selected someone else. I don't yet know who, but my department is upset and disappointed. Former co-workers of mine who are no longer with the company are confused and pissed off. I don't know when they'll tell us who got the job, but I have no intention of trying to carry out any of my plans. For one thing, I wouldn't have the authority to do any of that without the title. For another thing, they won't be paying me to do that stuff since they went with someone else. I'll just go back to doing what I did before, which is quietly doing my work behind the scenes, complaining about needed changes to whoever they chose for the job and seeing nothing substantive actually come from any of it, and continuing to pay out half of my post-tax pay in rent.