Received an invitation to take a CCAT test as well as a general technical assessment on the domain I was interviewing for. As unenthused as I feel about these kind of markers in determining a candidate's competency, it's a buyer's job market so what can ya do. The CCAT itself was a typical "IQ" + english fluency test so YMMV. The technical assessment was a hodgepodge of tech domain specific questions ranging from general definitions of specific tools to the esoterics like parsing regex and attribute prioritization. Some questions were reasonable, some were arguably not so make your best guess. I passed this round and had the typical recruiter call to go over logistics. The next round was a "roleplaying" exercise with a non-engr where you essentially act as a CX person chatting with a customer. Things were initially pleasant but halfway through the interview, I was accused of using AI tools. Apparently, the proof was that my responses sounded "robotic". I was stun locked to say the least and offered to share my screen to quell any suspicions but was shrugged off. At this point, for me, the interview was effectively over. The remainder of the time was spent going through the latter portion of the exercise and logistics. The ending was cordial. I withdrew my application after that. Getting falsely accused of cheating sullied what would have been a pleasant interview experience.

I wish I would have read the reviews on here first. I've been in the industry a long time and have been through many interviews, and I've never quite seen something like this. Apply, get an immediate response that I am within the top 10% of interviewers, a video and a phone number to call them at. Take two tests, one IQ / aptitude (I really don't know what it is), and one dated, and opinionated, frontend test. They find these two to "be the best use of everyone's time". The former was a combination of pattern matching, English / grammar, some sort of "clerical matching", and some short story form math problems. As to the latter, the questions that are "most" true or false, and yet some are bit ambiguous. These were _awfully_ worded, a total mouthful, but not all awful questions in content. Some dated, not as relevant though. Topics range from CSS box model to security to XMLHttpReqest vs. fetch, to Babel. Because Babel is "the most widely adopted transpiler for JavaScript applications". Maybe historically, not so much anymore. The cognitive test is particularly concerning to me. I suspect there are many smart and very good engineers who would “fail” this test in some category. The details of “Clerical matching” is just not what I connect to some of the best engineers I’ve worked with. It will be difficult for someone less proficient in English as well. I’d be pretty curious to see the “profile” of a successful files.com engineer — based on this upfront hiring process, I suspect once I’ve seen one I might have seen them all.