There is a cooldown if you do too many OAs

Recently I started noticing that many companies are moving to CodeSignal OAs. I got so tired of keep doing OAs and wasting time. Three of the companies I've interviewed with requested me to do CodeSignal OAs first, and I actually got blocked by Codesignal when trying to do the third one. The block message says I'm on a cooldown and cannot proceed! I heard maybe I could score share but some companies don't accept it.

I ran into a lot of confusion around cooldown and score sharing, and really looked into this. After what I went through and comparing several friends' experiences, just sharing what I found and hopefully it helps anyone who's also in a similiar situation. It's really annoying how more and more companies are asking for OAs first these days. They are just wasting people's time with meaningless hoops to jump through before even talking to a real interviewer from the company.

CodeSignal's OA Rules that people might not know

Some general codeSignal rules that I researched and found:

1. Within 30 days you can take the same assessment at most two times, and at most three times within 180 days.
2. Some company's assessments do not follow the global sharing rules since they maintain their own question banks.
3. Only certain verified results are eligible for sharing with companies, and in some cases the codeSignal platform does not provide a detailed reason if a result cannot be shared.

A Way to bypass these rules

There are actually ways to bypass these rules. I found out that if you hit the cooldown, but the new company doesn't allow you to just share the previous results. You can delete your existing account, and then create a new one with a new email address to bypass this issue. I tried this and can confirm that it works.

Companies mostly only have 2-3 OA questions

Other the cool down rules, also sharing the most helpful information I realized. Since many companies now rely on CodeSignal OAs, I found it helpful to track which companies use which assessments based on online resources, and practice them before the interview. Not all companies ask all codeSignal OA questions, they usually only ask the same 2-3 codeSignal OA questions. So if you practiced thoese 2-3 before hand, then it's much easier to pass the OAs.

For example, here's what I know about Meta and Co1nBase's question bank:

Meta asks:

• Bank System
• Cloud storage Sytem
• In-memory database

C0inbase asks:

• Bank System
• Cloud storage Sytem

Before starting doing the OAs, I usually check a combination of LeetCode discuss posts like this one: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7521718/meta-online-assessment-oa-2026-by-suniln-910f/, and different online resources like OfferRetriever for the exact question content if they have it https://offerretriever.com/companies/bb46cbd7-afcd-45b9-bf5d-0b2ca790d1d5. Or reddit post like this one to confirm the question bank: https://www.reddit.com/r/leetcode/comments/1es0fgx/codesignal_banking_system_question/

This is just what I gather from online resources, please share if anyone knows some additional data points for other companies. I'm even thinking about creating a shared excel sheet and crowd source the mapping between companies to their questions. Maybe this could help the whole community, but don't know if anyone's interested in this idea.

Additional observations

Proctored assessments usually allow sharing to companies that also request proctored results, and I think only Proctored assessments triggers the cool-down (not fully confirmed).

Companies that require Proctor

Meta, C0inbase, Circle, Dropbox

There's definitely more companies that requires Proctor, but this is as far as I know.

If anyone else has additional data points about the cooldown rules or company question bank, feel free to add them. It's honestly so much time wasted when a bunch of companies are asking us to complete OAs first, and only then can move on to later ones. I wish by sharing these rules, it saves others a bit of time.