ServiceNow reviews

- Company moves at a glacial pace. Every geo outside of US lacks any management or authority from most teams, so nearly every request must go round the globe to get approval from US. - Every team is extremely siloed. "SRE" at ServiceNow is about as far from the Google SRE model as possible. It should just be called: "Operations". Teams designing or developing applications or infrastructure are lost in a maze of Hyderabad, impossible to contact. Stuff is written or changed without any thought to alerting or outages, or how it will integrate with other systems. - Communication in general is the worst I've seen at any company of this size. Teams simply won't respond to emails, ignore their team distribution lists, ignore high severity tickets assigned to their queue. Manager tried to reach out to them too, got no response for over a month. For a critical production issue. Not even an acknowledgement. Many critical infrastructure systems are owned by a single person in the US, rather than a team. Any question or issue is met with "we need to wait for xyz to look at it" - sometimes these issues linger for years. - Project management are sycophants. Any project is always "100% green, everything is going ahead of schedule!". Identifying issues or asking questions is met with fierce opposition. Many cases where testing was requested, then found numerous issues, and launched anyway. Ultimately leading to major customer dissatisfaction due to advertised features not working properly at all. - Extreme emphasis on ITIL, while missing the point. Zealous adherence to ITIL for change management, but a terrible user experience. Working with the archaic and laggy interface for tickets is miserable. Despite this, many breaking changes and other regressions would often (every week) be introduced, which would have zero thought given to rollback or deployment, happily approved by multiple change advisory board meetings. Oh and all of this was done through the browser. Combined with the lack of communication from other teams, and the near-inability to find the developers involved in changes, meant every 'deployment' was a trash fire. - Monitoring is so bad. It is unbelievable. Operations handle all alerts, but have no say in how alerts are configured, thresholds etc. Constant noise. This is paired with an illogical and anachronistic mentality from upper-SRE management which want "a single pane of glass" whereby every single alert goes to SRE first. A huge portion of workload is simply reassigning tickets - to another team which then dutifully ignores them. - Every team is so lazy, but so comfortable, that trivial issues take months to solve. Communiation is a constant struggle, trying to get blood out of a stone. - The pay is far below-average. - Fundamental issues are ignored in favour of over-complicated solutions, and then those solutions only consider 'the happy path'. Failures will explode and cause unknown side effects. - Hiring calibration is broken. Our team routinely was floored by revelations such as *Principal* or *Senior Staff* engineers who didn't know how to use ssh, didn't know what a segfault was, etc. If we even managed to get them to reply in the first place, that is. - Management will sell you on the idea that 'our team will make a difference and improve this!'. Well, 2 years later and things only went backwards. - Poor design choices and horrible technical debt are hitting scaling limitations *hard*. Everything is constantly on fire.

On the surface this is “the place to work” but when you get to the core it is far from magical. Leaders act as though they walk on water. Team members are anything but welcoming. Bringing your authentic self really translates into you have liberty to do anything you want with little or no ramifications. I personally had to find my own way. No one wants to do anything that isn’t in their own personal interest and when you step up and be “that person” you are instantly chastised- something that no one else initially wanted to do becomes a free for all for others to criticize. As a matter of fact, it seems like everyone avoids getting work done just based on the sole reason that every non-mission critical task gets opened up to vetting beyond nauseum. You could have someone from a completely different business function telling you how to do something that you have done your entire career, but no one has your back to end the nonsense. You are expected to ride out the politics without a clear path to success – in anything. To say that leadership is innate may be true and if so, they are not finding leaders with this innate capability. In my experience here leaders/managers live by a “do as I say, not as I do” motto. I am in the mid to late stages of my career and have held many leadership positions, and I am blown away at how uninspired the leaders at this company make me feel. I was in a meeting one time with a leader showcasing some up & coming bells and whistles that were to be rolled out. I asked the question how did they plan to inform colleagues about this? His response: This is a self-service culture. That’s the beauty of what we implement, it needs little or no introduction. And I’ll give him this… there isn’t anything that is full service at this organization especially in the leadership department. Leaders manage to computer generated “nudges” and have little or no interest in what motivates their team members. For a company that is in touch with the uniqueness of their workforce they should be intimately aware that everyone is wired differently and thus a little effort to get to know their staff would go a long way. No one gave a lick about me as a person. So believe it or not I’ll end this- here. If you want a job where you have almost every freedom you could possibly think of and decent pay- I would say hop on board. If you want a career experience that is going to make you feel a sense of accomplishment and feel respected for what you bring to the table, RUN AWAY as fast as you can.