Salesforce.com Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Dec 20, 2011 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 5 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 5 ratings
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Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce.com
Posted Dec 20, 2011 — 2 of 2 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2011 (took 4 weeks)
It was a typical software interview with questions on algorithms, time complexity analysis, and database query questions. A professional interview process although one interviewer was really freaky in his demeanor. There were hardly any behavioral type questions, which I appreciated very much...all the interviewers seemed happy with their jobs at the company..
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Group/Panel Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce.com
Posted Nov 9, 2011 — 4 of 5 people found this helpful
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2.0
Easy Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed May 2011 in San Francisco, CA (took a day)
salesforce has something like 700+ jobs they're advertising, but they're not really hiring. The job ads let them cast a wider net, get a sense of what type of talent is out there, but hiring is very very slow. Similar to Google but more disorganized. It took more than 2 months from my first contact with their recruiter to my onsite interview. I don't believe the company is really growing, they have work for which they wish they could hire but hiring is not a priority or considered critical for growth. So one could be wasting a lot of time waiting on them to make up their mind.
Phone interview was 45 min long, we went over some parts of resume, some technical (fairy easy) questions. Interviewer didn't seem to know what to ask, so it was a pretty random back and forth, conversation style discussion. He went onto to explain what his group does and how he and his team interact with others. No real structure, very adhoc and no process.
Full day interview onsite, all 1:1 with technical folks and senior managers. Again a situation where none of interviewers seem to know what to ask, the first interviewer started with random basic technical questions , mostly abstract. The questions were vague, and he didn't ask them clearly so it was hard to understand where he was going. The whole session was unpleasant, and ridiculous ... it made me lose interest.
The next interviews were with folks with some industry experience but no one really senior. Questions on database basics, OS, Java, etc. A few wanted to discuss the same minor technical problem they had encountered earlier, not knowing I had already discussed it earlier with one of the interviewers. Again none of the interviewers didn't know what to ask, even from my resume. Most seemed unsure and vague, which was disconcerting.
Their whole environment is build on top of this 1 Oracle db table (data multi-tenancy they call it), and they have layers of Java to marshal data in and between the different layers and the Oracle table. They make outlandish claims like what they' ve built is the one of most complex Java apps in the world while it's a pretty run of mill, lipsticked web CRUD app with convoluted tricks to make up for all the poor arch decision they made so far. Their former cto gave a talk at a qcon conference, explaining how they got into this mess. You can see the talk on infoq.com They have lots of ex-Oracle folks whose job is to curate and maintain this one table. They're not working on any real interesting technical problems, which probably explains why hiring is slow.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview, a Skills Test and a Personality Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce.com
Posted Aug 29, 2011 — 0 of 2 people found this helpful
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jul 2009 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 days)
you need to clear toughest programming test which tests your aptitude skills and analytical thinking power,
salesforce wants best people available in the market you need to be competitive enough if you have brains this is the best place to work for and you should be career centric. around 9 people interview and 2 hours of written test think how much technical stuff they should have asked to get the job
Other Details
I got the interview through a Staffing Agency and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a Group/Panel Interview, a Presentation, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Skills Test, a Personality Test and a Background Check.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce.com
Posted Dec 9, 2009 — 2 of 2 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2009 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 weeks)
Had an hour long technical interview, followed by a six hour on-site interview. One with a senior engineer, a two hour programming exercise on a laptop, an hour lunch, an hour with a hiring manager, and an hour with two more junior developers. The questions were mostly around data structures and algorithms, and some SQL stuff. Staff were courteous, although the question asking seemed to have been more artificial in nature, e.g. the grid path question was asked posed incorrectly (after I looked it up), the junior developers couldn't explain exactly the problem they were asking a solution to.
Did not get an offer, the position was actually a step down for me (to development) so my on the spot white board coding was probably not up to their expectations. I guess I'll have to take my years of experience designing enterprise level software to some place else. Also, I hadn't looked for a job in a long time, so my prep work was not complete.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Senior Software Engineer at Salesforce.com
Posted Mar 18, 2009 — 7 of 7 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2008 in San Francisco, CA (took 2 days)
I am a college hire, so my interview process began at a campus job fair. Fairly standard technical questions (basic OO, DB, and algorithm analysis), but no deep personality questions.
A few days later, I received a call inviting me to an on-site interview. They were very accommodating to my schedule, letting me pick any day I wanted within the next couple weeks. Generally companies have set days for interviews, so this was quite unexpected and already set Salesforce above most others.
The on-site interview was a whole day affair. It started at 9am with a 2-1/2 hour programming test. They sit you in a room with a laptop (with internet), give you a problem to work on, and come back a couple hours later and take you to lunch. The programming test emphasizes scalability over completeness. While I am sure finishing the program is a plus, they seemed more interested in the overall design you choose and if you put any thoughts into efficiency and scalability (i.e. what data structures you used). If it's any indication, I didn't finish the program, but still got an offer.
After lunch, there are a series of 1:1 or 2:1 interviews (~4 hours total). Employees from different teams come and talk to you about various topics, such as security, basic network/web knowledge, OO design, .Net knowledge (although this might have been unusual since most development is in Java, and even the .Net stuff is being converted to Java), and DB normalization. It's a bit rough, but the interviewers realize that you probably don't know everything about every topic. They will all have a copy of your resume and they tend to center questions around what is on it. That means you have to be confident with whatever is on your resume and they do expect you to talk in detail about anything on it, but they try not to ask questions on stuff you probably don't know.
Overall, I came into the interviews with hesitation, but left feeling confident and excited about the prospect of getting an offer. The employees seem very excited to be there, and there is a certain electric atmosphere that is apparent when you walk into the office. Everyone is in low-rise cubes, which fosters collaboration, but means less privacy. The views of the bay are fantastic and very relaxing.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
I received a verbal offer a couple weeks after my interview. A few days later, I received another call announcing that they had increased my offer in several ways (base salary, sign-on bonus, etc...). I did not ask for any of that.
After the unexpected increase, I did not negotiate my offer.
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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