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ServiceNow coding interview and online assessment, format and difficulty

qa_quinn · 4 replies

did the servicenow online assessment + live coding rounds last month while employed, so i was not particularly stressed, which helped me actually pay attention to what was happening.

Online assessment (OA): HackerRank, 90 minutes, 2 coding problems. difficulty was solidly medium leetcode. one string manipulation problem (sliding window pattern, nothing exotic), one graph/BFS problem on a grid. no SQL, no system design in the OA. they give you the full 90 min but if you're prepped the problems take 45-50 minutes. test cases were not brutal, hidden tests caught one edge case i missed on the BFS.

Live coding (technical phone screen, pre-onsite): CoderPad, ~50 minutes, one problem. mine was a medium-ish tree problem. they were pretty collaborative, like they'd give a nudge if i was spinning on something. not silent assassin vibes. they asked about time/space complexity after i had a working solution, and then asked me to optimize. i optimized from O(n^2) to O(n log n), that seemed sufficient.

Onsite coding round: Two separate 45-minute coding sessions on separate days (their onsite was virtual). one was graphs again (shortest path variant), one was more of a design-ish coding question about building a simple rate limiter (not system design, actual code). no hard leetcode that i encountered. if you can do lc medium comfortably you're in the right place.

language: i used Python throughout, no issues. they support the usual languages.

overall: not as intense as the typical big-tech loop. they want clean, correct code and decent communication. grinding lc hard is overkill for most of this process.

good luck to whoever's in the middle of it.

4 replies

frontend_fran

The rate limiter coding question shows up a lot in enterprise SaaS interviews, I think because it's actually relevant to their products. Did they expect the full token bucket implementation or was a simpler sliding window counter acceptable?

quietquit_quincy

I went with sliding window log and they were happy. They did ask me to extend it to support different rate limits per user tier, which made it more interesting. I don't think they expected one specific approach, they wanted to see how you iterate.

qa_quinn

For the OA, did you get a link right after applying or after a recruiter call? trying to understand the sequence.

quietquit_quincy

Recruiter call first, then OA link came within 2 days. The call was short, 20 min, mostly verifying basics (see the other thread on the phone screen). OA doesn't happen before a human has screened you, at least in my case.