[_winx]

They take forever to reply (2 months since my first email, meanwhile they regularly kept posting the job on HN) and after the initial call had me take a home assignment that I spent almost an entire day on, then went total radio silence again - not even a generic "sorry for the delay" or a rejection email. I see I'm not an outlier, given others' comments under their postings. I don't think the job's fake - they just really don't care about their candidates' time.

[tomhow]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43551810.

[davidsojevic]

We're always looking to improve where we can to reduce any gaps in the process and to make sure no applications slip through the cracks.

I can't find any calls/interviews with your name and also can't find any submission from you on our code challenge[0] (which is the only take home task that we ask devs to do), but it may just mean that you've applied under a different name and GitHub profile than you have listed on the website in your about page/your HN username.

If you can reach out to me at david at serpapi.com and provide me with some more detail about your application I can try and find out what's happened here.

[0] https://github.com/serpapi/code-challenge

[_winx]

I obviously withdrew from the interview process already, but what you wrote is either plain untrue or you really do have huge gaps in the process. Here's what I have on my side:

- an entire email conversation (including quiz you sent me, which also took time to respond to) - I obviously used the same name and email domain which can traced back to my profile,

- the emails about initial call I self-scheduled and attended,

- the repo (under your GitHub org), a PR I opened (as requested) and two more emails from me - one was a confirmation of completion of the task and another to touch base after a week of complete silence.

The task was different from the one you linked - to write a scraper which extracts search results from Google page, according to the sample input HTML and expected JSON output that were provided.

[davidsojevic]

Given the large delta between what you've experienced and what I can find on my side, the only thing I can think is that your application has been handled outside of our standard process (perhaps directly with someone?) and/or that the SaaS we use to manage the process isn't surfacing you in search.

The code challenge linked has been used for the software engineer candidates long before I began at SerpApi and, in the spirit of transparency, candidates have been directed to make their submissions via a PR to the public repository since almost our earliest employees, e.g. Ilya's submission can be found here: https://github.com/serpapi/code-challenge/pull/6

Can you please forward the email chain(s) to me at david at serpapi.com so I can look into it? Even if you've withdrawn from the process, I would very much appreciate having a copy of these to see what's gone wrong.

[_winx]

Upon checking these emails, I realized what I did. It's a different company but with an but with an overlap in name/domain (Serp API/Search API) and similar website where I also applied. As embarrassing as this is, it really happened. I don't want to spread misinformation but can't edit the parent posts anymore. I'll contact the mods if it's possible to just edit/delete them. I'm really sorry.

[chaosharmonic]

I know the OP was a mixup, but related question... do you only reach back out if it's for an interview? I had an experience last year myself where I never heard anything at all. Which was unfortunate, bc this place actually fascinated me on a bunch of levels.