ServiceNow Frontend Interview Experience — A Wasted Effort Due to Budget Issues 💸❌

Overview

A frontend engineer participated in a series of interviews with ServiceNow, a company recognized for its stringent technical hiring process. The candidate successfully navigated two technical rounds but was ultimately rejected due to budget limitations, despite having disclosed salary expectations to HR beforehand. This experience serves as a cautionary tale about the need for transparency in the hiring process and the importance of candidates confirming compensation details upfront.

Interview Rounds

Round 1: DSA + Machine Coding

This round consisted of two parts: a data structures and algorithms (DSA) problem and a machine coding challenge.

• Problem Solving: The candidate was tasked with reversing a string and sorting words based on their length while preserving the original sequence. The provided JavaScript code snippet demonstrates the implemented solution.

  function arrange(sentence) {
      let modifiedString = sentence.slice(0, -1)?.toLowerCase();
      let wordsFrequency = {};
      let words = modifiedString.split(' ');
      
      words.forEach(word => {
          let length = word.length;
          wordsFrequency[length] = 
              wordsFrequency[length] ? 
              [...wordsFrequency[length], word] : [word];
      });
  
      let resultArray = Object.keys(wordsFrequency)
          .sort((a, b) => a - b)
          .flatMap(key => wordsFrequency[key]);
  
      let resultString = resultArray.join(' ');
      return (
          resultString.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + resultString.slice(1) + '.'
      );
  }
  

• Machine Coding: The candidate was required to replicate a given UI and implement a "pole game" using Vanilla JavaScript. Success in this portion depended on a strong understanding of DOM manipulation, efficient use of event listeners, and code reusability.

Round 2: Advanced Machine Coding + Experience Discussion

This round involved a discussion of the candidate's previous experience followed by an advanced machine coding challenge.

• Discussion on Previous Experience: The interviewers inquired about the candidate's biggest challenges in previous projects, their approach to performance optimization in large-scale applications, and their debugging and problem-solving strategies.

• Machine Coding: The candidate was asked to build a To-Do application with features including adding new tasks, viewing all tasks, marking tasks as completed, and editing/deleting tasks. The provided HTML and JavaScript code demonstrates a basic implementation.