Deel interview questions

The introductory conversation with HR went very well! The process, company and roles were described in details and all my questions were answered. But. this HR lost my homework assignment -_- Right after the intro call, you get a homework assignment that needs to be completed in a week, but it's stated to take no more than 3 hours. It is actually complex and you have to tradeoff to complete it even in 5 hours. After submitting the task and then checking back a week later, I received no response. Nothing... I had a person at Deel contact this HR and only then did they find my email and review the assignment quickly. I was disappointed with the review. Their mentions of approaches were mostly wrong, but the major red flag I got on rejection - potential SQL injection, was correct. So that's fair, probably. But they didn't mention my advanced approaches, such as database denormalisation and indexes to significantly improve query execution time. They don't seem to want witty engineers, but resilient ones who can do standardised work.

I think this company has no intent of hiring anyone for this position. This position was initially published in NAMER in December 2023 then by around Feb 2024 it was published in EMEA. Deel received hundreds of thousands of application in both these locations but did not manage to find one suitable candidate. Then few months later it was published in APAC and then again in EMEA. I sincerely believe that Deel is just creating a mirage of growth to mislead the investors. They are probably planning another round of fund raising or something and want the investors to believe the Boom story. There are no real openings, they are just wasting candidates time here. How else can they explain not being able to find one candidate across 4 continents in the past 9 months?