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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Diego, California

June 1, 2020
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

  1. Phone screen with recruiter for 30 minutes. She explained the company and role and asked about my interests. She asked how long I used certain technologies, what I knew about the company, and my desired salary.

  2. A week later, I had a 30-minute Zoom technical/behavioral call with the director of the team. There was no coding. He asked about my projects, which project I am most proud of, how I handled a difficult teammate, what I knew about the company, why I left my previous job, and where I see myself in 5 or 10 years. Technical questions included: "walk me through how you would find the overlaps between two contracts given the start and end time of the contract" and "how would you find all the passwords in a file and turn them into X's."

  3. Early the following week, I had a 30-minute Zoom call with a technical recruiter to prepare me for the onsite final round. I appreciated this opportunity to get more information about the onsite and ask questions, though the recruiter couldn't share too many specifics.

  4. A few days later, I had the 3-hour Zoom onsite, which consisted of 4 rounds, each 45 minutes long with a 15-minute break in the middle:

  • The first 3 rounds were with 2 engineers each and consisted of 10 minutes of chatting about myself and resume questions, as well as some technical questions like: "explain Big O," "what are Promises in JavaScript," "tell me about projects involving Java," and "how do you test." The next 30 minutes involved a coding question done through HackerRank. The questions I received are in the section below. I felt that some interviewers were not very responsive or helpful and remained silent until I asked if I was heading in the right direction. When I was done, I was asked to test my solution, provide time and space complexity, and discuss how I could optimize it. The last few minutes allowed me to ask them questions.
  • The last round was a panel of 3 managers/directors and included many behavioral questions such as: "what are the top 3 things you care about when writing good code," "talk about projects and teams," "why did you get into software," and "tell me about your leadership positions."

I received the rejection call/email an hour later with feedback.

Overall, it was a fast process, and I really liked all the managers and recruiters I spoke with. I got the general consensus from everyone that it is a great company to work for because of the culture. They seemed to tailor the questions to my resume, so I did not get any questions that were completely foreign to me. The technical questions were not difficult in my opinion, but I experience performance anxiety during live coding. They are looking for people who fit the culture, and the feedback mentioned they loved my personality but could not hire me because of my coding skill.

Good luck!

Questions

Given an integer, if the number is prime, return 1. Otherwise, return its smallest divisor greater than 1.

For example, if n = 24, its divisors are [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24]. The smallest divisor greater than 1 is 2.

Leetcode 49: Group Anagrams

Leetcode 238: Product of Array Except Self

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 6 interview experiences for the ServiceNow Senior Software Engineer role in San Diego, California.

Success Rate

33%
Pass Rate

ServiceNow's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in San Diego, California is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive50%
Neutral17%
Negative33%

Candidates reported having good feelings for ServiceNow's Senior Software Engineer interview process in San Diego, California.

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