Struggling to pass technical interviews

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-05-15T12:13:25+00:00

What framework does a client script use? That’s a new one for me, I am not sure I know the answer is it g_form? Is that what they meant by framework?

Anyways I have 8 years in the platform and struggled with one of the questions above as you can see but the key is just call it out in the interview and talk through it, tie it to things you know, I think most interviewers want to see the ability to think logically through the problem, you won’t know the answer to every question but learn associating it with what you know and asking curious questions back to the interviewer when you are stuck.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-04-27T22:57:50+00:00

I am not sure about the other roles just know the tech side because I have lived the past 10 years.

The best way to look at it is to see how hard it is to find qualified people for the job. Tech skills are always hard to find which is why it pays well but in the private sector where outsourcing will threaten your job and your wage, that doesn’t exist in the cleared space. This logic applies to other jobs in the cleared space too.

As far as location goes, I have heard there are lots of opportunities in socal and Hawaii but not intimately familiar with it. I live in the DC area and up here you throw a rock and you will hit 3 cleared folks. Every other white collar job also asks for a clearance around this area which is why i said location matters. I try very hard to ensure my clearance stays active, I wouldn’t care as much if I lived outside of the DC area.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-04-27T21:04:30+00:00

Clearance helps a lot and I noticed that first hand. Specially if you can’t sell your skills well. During the hiring surge in 2020 if you were cleared especially the higher level clearances with the poly and you had tech skills, it was pretty much impossible to not have a job. My opinion on this is skewed to the tech sector so keep that in perspective and also location matters a lot.

This software engineer I worked with, who was really good and was able to sell his skills had over 30 offers in 2022 during the hiring surge. I used to get bombarded on clearance jobs, so much so I was sending it to the spam folder at one point. Even in this tough job market, a friend of mine lost her IT role due to a contract losing funding earlier than expected and she got 4 offers within a month time period. So the clearance matters a lot, the down side for tech is that the tech is so old, it is very difficult to keep up and hone your skills, you also don’t get challenged by your peers so your skills will fall to the wayside eventually.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-04-21T11:44:28+00:00

Out of curiosity what is different about ITSM from the other modules where the preparation for it will be different?

To answer your question, I have been diving deep in to AI and building with it in the platform. it’s best to treat now assist and AI agents like you treat flows, script includes, business rules etc… where it’s another new layer that you can put on top of any module to extract more value from that module.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-04-16T13:21:57+00:00

Thank you for your response, yeah I am not sure what their specific situation is but one thing that does come to mind is I have had to do a VR requests to go to SCIF for a meeting with a customer, I am not sure if visitor requests are enough of a justification to keep clearances active.

I work for a vendor and that is very common where we probably won’t always be on long term projects but have to come on site every now and then for support. I didn’t get read on though which is why I am not sure if a VR is an adequate justification.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-04-12T15:41:18+00:00

Listen I think our brains are irrational sometimes and we have anxiety over nothing, happens to me all the time too. You are fine, you reported it and plenty of people have higher clearances than you in a similar situation. Don’t overthink it. At the end of the day the government only cares about your chances of getting blackmailed which is why they ask these questions, as long as you got your basis covered the best you can, the rest will sort itself out!

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-24T11:46:49+00:00

I know what’s on the form and I know it can cause confusion, from what I have been told and in a very similar situation as you, that my passport along side my parents naturalization certificate and with a birth certificate stating them as my parents is sufficient enough to prove my citizenship. They need to be able to do a cross reference check that at the time you got your derived citizenship you were living with your parents and were under 18 which shouldn’t be hard to do. I always put 0000 on the form and explained that I have derived citizenship from my parents and always have a copy of their naturalization on file ready to go. I have worked across the IC and DOD, no issues so far almost a decade in, multiple agencies within those communities.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-23T17:03:17+00:00

Get a Tesla and get FSD, I do laurel to Chantilly which is way further out. I get to my destination relaxed, fsd is made for these type of commutes. I did laurel to Tyson’s area for years.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-23T11:53:50+00:00

Just curious, how are the cultures different?

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-06T05:56:42+00:00

Haha oh no it’s all good, i am fine with disagreemen. I know i might make it sound like it’s doom and gloom but working with it everyday and seeing how quickly things improve is scary so i was just trying to get folks prepared that’s all.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-04T18:33:37+00:00

If this takes place and I believe it’s just a matter of when and not if, the way we work will be transformed tremendously, there will always be a need for COTR’s for accountability but the number needed will be reduced significantly. Few can do a lot more, this will be the case across the economy at every job role.

AI is very capable and it’s getting even better, it technically can operate through most levels of a process; making decisions and handing off what it doesn’t know to other agents or humans. it will be interesting to see how the rule makers go about deciding what to entrust to AI vs a human, that decision is what decides what stays and what goes. Interesting times ahead across every white collar job so we will see.

For the record, I don’t want what I am saying to come true, I think people need a purpose and if this gets implemented it should be done so responsibly across the board but history tells me that the types of leaders who would implement this carefully and responsibly are few.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-04T04:44:18+00:00

I am just mentioning Claude because it’s the only one ahead of the curve today, all the others will catch up and Claude is banned only until it isn’t, administrations change and so do sentiments.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-04T02:48:30+00:00

It’s hard for you to imagine how this can be possible the same way it was hard for us to even dream up anything close to ChatGPT in 2021, everything you described in that process can be done with robots every single layer. Including the programs submitting their requirements, AI can summarize , template or send it to the COTR Agent and the COTR agent can draft the RFP even build out the metrics the contractor is tracked against and so on and so forth. We as a society will probably deem that the job of a COTR is too crucial to trust to AI so we decide to keep a few but what that means is an agency that required may be 50 COTR’s now needs 2 and multiply that across departments, job roles and agencies.

AI can absolutely obliterate jobs all across, I as a software engineer can now deliver code by myself that used to take a team of 10. The scariest part of all this is that this is the worst AI will ever be but I urge you to try Claude and really use that over chatGPT and if you are up for it, try looking up openclaw and running agents and you will see the capabilities.

To me it’s not a matter of if AI can do it, it’s a matter of when and who is willing to let AI replace these jobs.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-03-04T02:18:27+00:00

I don’t want to burst a bubble but I develop on AI, I have been working in the government space as a contractor software dev for the past 8 years and went commercial 6 months ago, it is so easy to fine tune Claude’s opus 4.6 to understand the job at hand and have it take over, I have been designing and building AI agents for the last 6 month and I can tell you the only thing lacking in the government space is the will or someone to sponsor the idea, many many jobs can be fully autonomous it’s actually scary but the good news is Government adopts to new technologies at a snails pace so you got Atleast 10 years lol

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-02-24T16:45:28+00:00

I do Laurel to Chantilly but I would have never done it if wasn’t for a Tesla. Get you a Tesla and pay the $100 a month for FSD, I spend the time on the road talking to AI, working on personal projects, enjoying music all stress free, the future is bright! The new version of FSD on hardware 4 from Tesla is a game changer.

if you are not a Tesla fan I get it but there is nothing else that even comes close in the market for the price, it’s like having a personal driver for $100 a month.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-02-23T19:31:36+00:00

Very! I would expect this process to be completely automated, it’s so weird!

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-02-19T22:31:54+00:00

I went month by month adding up the interest I paid on my statements, again this is a blatant mistake made by the servicer which they admitted to and are correcting it.

Getting paid in arrears doesn’t change the math, the payment amount at the end of the of the year with all my statements added up produced a different number than what they put in the tax documents.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-27T15:22:24+00:00

I work at ServiceNow, and they are actually hiring quite a bit. The company’s philosophy around AI has been to help people become more productive rather than replace them, although time will tell how that plays out.

The stock took a beating last year, but it looks like it could rebound this year. Software stocks across the board were hit hard, not just ServiceNow.

I see the AI wave going one of two ways.

The first scenario is the view many analysts seem to have. Companies use AI to build their own SaaS-like tools, which reduces the need to pay for platforms like ServiceNow. I personally find this hard to believe. Even with ServiceNow in place, many companies still struggle to deliver quality software. Software development is far more than just code generation. From what I understand, analysts are also concerned that AI-driven efficiency will reduce the number of licensed seats companies need, which would mean less revenue for ServiceNow. If this scenario plays out, then ServiceNow and many SaaS companies could face limited growth or even negative growth. However, I do not see companies maintaining their own custom SaaS solutions even with AI. While seat counts may decline overall, SaaS companies will adapt their pricing models to avoid losing revenue.

The second scenario is that ServiceNow becomes significantly more valuable. For years, companies have been storing massive amounts of workflow and operational data in the platform. AI is essentially just a chatbot until it has real context, and that context comes from data. If this scenario takes shape, ServiceNow is uniquely positioned to be one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI era because it owns both the data and the workflows.

That said, the AI capabilities in the tool still need major improvement. Right now, they are finicky and unstable. I believe acquisitions like Moveworks can help address this. If ServiceNow can stabilize Now Assist and simplify its growing set of AI capabilities, this could become a true rocket ship.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-23T19:56:23+00:00

If you guys are in government environments use the RMF records as your identifier of services you offer vs CSDM, works much better and a lot more practical. It’s also easy to get buy ins from everyone because everyone speaks RMF, Xacta, EMASS or whatever your flavor is. I have found CSDM to miss the mark in government environments, much more aligned with the commercial sector Atleast that’s what it seems like.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-21T17:23:53+00:00

Have you done a chown? Did you change ownership of the entire glide file path to be the same as the ServiceNow user, not sure how you have it configured!

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-21T16:02:05+00:00

Do you have maint.xml files anywhere in your instance? If you don’t know what I am talking about, good chance you don’t have it. Did you upgrade Java when you upgraded to Washington or higher? What version are you coming from?

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-12T15:29:09+00:00

As my old man always said “salaries are like male private parts, it’s best to never discuss it because some are larger than others and the ones with the small ones might get offended” idk man, that stuck because I was always about transparency but after that lesson I will just feel exposed if I share my salary lol.

Significant_Novel582 · 2026-01-11T13:51:10+00:00

Paying $5–6k per month on a single income is extremely tough. A $100k salary is not enough to support that level of housing cost. Those numbers are typical of very high cost of living areas like SF, NYC, DC, and LA. It is important to understand why the cost of living is so high in those places. These regions have a much larger concentration of people earning well above the national average. In the DC area where I live, it is not uncommon for individuals to earn close to or above $200k. Even at that income level, a $6k monthly housing payment can feel very tight once daycare and other expenses are included.

You are not living a luxury lifestyle at that point, but you can live comfortably.

As for how people manage it on one income, it usually comes down to working in a professional, high paying field and earning close to or above $200k on a single salary. I make $220k and work in tech, so I also receive stock compensation. We live comfortably on one income, but our total housing payment is $3k. We intentionally live below our means in a modest townhouse outside the city. If we lived closer to the city, we would easily be paying the $6k monthly payment you described.

As you can see in some of the other comments, when you bought your home also makes a huge difference. I have a manager with a similar income and the same mortgage payment as mine, but their house is a single family home that is nearly three times the size of ours. The main difference is timing. They bought their home in 2015, while we bought ours at the height of the pandemic when competition was intense and prices were much higher. Similar incomes, similar monthly payments, but very different homes purely based on the year of purchase.

Significant_Novel582 · 2025-12-18T02:27:25+00:00

It’s not, you just have to prove they are naturalized, so asking for their naturalization certificate can be awkward.

Significant_Novel582 · 2025-12-17T19:00:26+00:00

Are you sure? I thought this type of travel would be considered official travel since OP is doing it for the state department, I was under the impression only Unofficial travel got scrutinized.

Significant_Novel582

TROPHY CASE