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