I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Salesforce (Burlington, MA) in Mar 2020
Interview
The interview process was smooth, the recruiter was amazing and prompt through out. The interviewers on the panel were inexperienced and asked a basic question with an addition to sort them alphabetically. After I solved the problem with the clear instructions that the strings were alphabetical I was told the string can be alphanumeric and your solution won't work, to which I came up with the HashMap implementation. At the end of the day I guess it's your luck if the interviewer is inexperienced and changes the problem statement halfway and doesn't care even if you adjust to the changed question and solve it. From my experience so far with Salesforce, they need to train the interviewers better.
6 rounds of technical, each round is an eliminator you should each round to go next. The first round will be quite simple where mostly some logical questions will be there. reaming rounds will be more Archit point of view with problme solitions an solution desing.
My first interview was just a conversation with a principal engineer on the team. The conversation went great. I liked everything I heard about the company and the job, and felt like that was the right job for me. The job requirements were exactly the skills I have and I knew I could make a big impact there.
Afterwards I was given an online assessment on HackerRank and that's where everything went downhill. Salesforce seems to use a custom coding problem because I have never been able to find any mention of that problem anywhere else. I believe it's a problem they came up with and uploaded to HackerRank. Without giving two much details, it was a problem to maximize an output given some input.
The coding problem was broken. The test cases were expecting the wrong answer. I know this because not only did I find by hand two contradicting answers, but after my online assessment I pulled up my own IDE and coded a brute force solution to confirm, and once again I found multiple contradicting answers. Basically, the test cases were expecting some number to be the max output, but there were at least 2 outputs that were greater, which I confirmed by hand.
So of course I failed the assessment because their test cases were broken, and I couldn't figure out how to break my code to give match the wrong expected answers.
I reached out to HackerRank to let them know that I thought the online assessment had a problem, and they told me I had to contact Salesforce directly to get it worked out. This makes me think that it was definitely a custom problem created by Salesforce.
A few days later I received the rejection email. Oh well, I could have made a big impact there, but they failed me due to their broken problem.