Interview consisted of 2 phone interviews, a take home project and in person interviewing.
First phone interview with hiring manager was a "get to know you" call. Easy.
Second phone interview was with engineer who asked some specific questions (some of which were) related to my skill set. (1) Hibernate: how to perform a save; diff between save and update; attached vs detached (2) diff between HashMap and HashSet (3) Hash code and collision avoidance. Some tough questions in there about data structure implementation in Java. Moderate difficulty.
He also got me onto CollabEdit to produce some code for him: (1) reverse array (2) prime factors. Follow up questions were on how to make the code more efficient (time and memory). Easy except no auto-complete in CollabEdit.
Received a take home project (Bliffoscope). They give you a week to implement it. It takes about that long to complete working evenings. Moderate difficulty, just time consuming.
Interviews started at 11 am and ended at 6 pm - total of 6 interviews. No breaks, no lunch. Pretty intense. Some of these guys are very smart. Out of the 6 interview there were a couple where the interviewer was out to lunch. Literally texting on their phone or "only have 20 minutes" and rushing out the door.
First interview (Senior): Don't recall much about this, I had brought a presentation on my current project which I walked him through and he asked questions about.
Second interview (Principle): This guy had other things on his mind. Gave me a problem to work on the white board and sat back and responded to texts. Reverse the words in an array using one char of swap space. If you figure out the trick, it's easy (reverse the whole array then reverse each word back). I didn't figure out the trick and got zero input from interviewer. Normally, you get a little bit of guidance if you are off track. Floundered here with a brute force approach which is tough to figure out on a whiteboard.
Third Interview (Senior): Another I have blanked on. Asked me to write some SQL - even though they don't really use it? Very friendly, relaxed.
Fourth Interview (Senior): Solid interviewer. Asked me the usual questions, then got me on his laptop to fix a bug in some code (Tennis match scoring app). Most difficult part was working Eclipse on a mac (they use all mac at ServiceNow). After figuring out how tennis scoring works (crazy!) resolved the bug fairly quickly and discussed how the app could be made better. This guy was involved, interested and helpful when I asked questions.
Fifth Interview (Director): This guy was on his way out the door. Dropped the "shortest path in a graph" algorithm on me. I wasn't ready for this one, but worked it out. Lots of discussion on this, peppered me with questions. He left before I completed it which led to Interview #6
Sixth Interview (unknown): This guy got thrown in the room when the Director left, he sat there and texted as well as I worked the problem on the board. Funny thing is I finished and he didn't even look up, just said "OK". Fact of the matter was that the algorithm was *not* correct.
I followed up with e-mails (including completed solutions for those that I hadn't fully completed for them) thanking them for their time. No response, which was a harbinger of things to come.
4 weeks after interview, still no response (Yeah, I've got that high school dating feeling now). No scheduled call, no information what-so-ever.
End of 4th week I get a call at 6:30 PM from hiring manager. Not going to be a fit. I ask for any specific feedback he can provide to help me. Response is "You need to interview more" and "Your failure to focus on the problem at large".
Now for my commentary:
OK. Not a fit, that's cool. He would not give me specific interviews where these comments would apply (I was a referral, so I know someone there and it makes sense he didn't want to upset anyone).
My general feeling on ServiceNow is that they want to find people who are super smart or study data structures and algorithms. I asked a couple of times after given a problem "Do you guys do a lot of stuff like this?" and the answer was always "No". My impression, based on the interviews is that there are a lot of "thinkers" and not too many "do-ers".
Negative experience is due to:
1. Some interviewers were out to lunch
2. Amount of time for a response was un-professional and insulting