This was an interview for a San Diego-based front-end role on the Digital Customer Experience (DXC) team. The interview process at ServiceNow was streamlined overall.

A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, and I applied shortly after. All interviews were scheduled for 45 minutes on Zoom, but several ran long. I had three interviews with engineers and one final interview with the hiring manager.

The technical interviews were slightly easy, especially for someone who has never received an offer from a big tech company. All started with a discussion of past experience, followed by some technical coding. The recruiter provided vague but accurate guidance about what to expect for each round.

The first interview asked for pseudocode to validate matched parentheses, a simple problem with a linear-time solution.

The second interview asked for pseudocode to implement an LRU Cache. I was unimpressed with this interviewer. I suggested that this could be done either with an ordered dictionary/hashmap or a doubly-linked list. The interviewer seemed unaware of the ordered hashmap approach, which is technically the superior option because it uses less memory. He insisted on the linked list implementation, stating, "not all languages have an ordered dictionary," which is more true for linked lists. We proceeded to spend the rest of the interview implementing a doubly-linked list.

The third interview covered many front-end technical questions: JavaScript variable scoping/shadowing, centering nested divs, flattening an array, and implementing a throttling function. This was a fast-paced interview using their Hackerrank interface, so thankfully, I was prepared to work quickly.

The hiring manager interview was uneventful, focusing on previous experience and role-based access control. This interview felt like a cross-examination and left a cold impression of the hiring manager. I was told that they collaborate often with their teams in India, so evening calls are somewhat common.

They had a fast turnaround for the verbal offer: $150k base salary, $15k target bonus, $60k RSU over 4 years ($15k annual RSU), and no sign-on bonus, for a total annual compensation of $180k. The recruiter had previously quoted a base salary range of $145k to $160k for San Diego. I was disappointed in this offer, which was low compared to public data and their stated range.

The recruiter shared that all feedback from the interview rounds was extremely positive and noted I have an MS in CS. After the recruiter learned I had another pending offer, they refused to negotiate before hearing the competing offer. I accepted the other offer without negotiating with ServiceNow. The other role and product were much more exciting, even if ServiceNow could match the compensation package.

Valid Parentheses (LeetCode #20)

Describe a procedure to determine whether all parentheses are correctly matched. No running code is necessary.

LRU Cache (LeetCode #146)

Describe how to implement a LRU Cache.

Write a function to flatten an array to one level in JavaScript. (LeetCode #2625)

Write a throttled function in JavaScript. (LeetCode #2676)