Hi Leetcoders,

I have recently cleared Salesforce interview for Hyderabad location. It started in Dec 2020. I had approached a classmate who was working in Salesforce for referral. After 15 days I got an email from the HR to schedule a round with the Hiring Director.

Round 1 : Hiring Director [1 hour]
Salesforce seems to be fanatic about their culture and I was surprised for my first round being a Director round. We discussed about the role, and I was asked lots of questions regarding my work experience (I have experience working at a startup and a large product company) and projects I have done.

After 2 days from the discussion I received email from HR regarding further rounds

Kindly note that 80% of questions are present in LC and you will definitely solve them if you have solved > 200 LC questions, i cannot discuss exact questions partially due to NDA and my belief that it's pretty useless since you won't be asked the same question mostly.

Round 2 : Coding + Design [45 min]
1 coding + 1 mini design
Was asked a medium level question on Strings. I had solved a similar question before, so after going to and fro with the approaches with the interviewer I hit upon the solution and implemented it quickly.

That took about 20 mins including constraint clarification, coding and testing.

I was asked a design question on basis of my experience (cloud computing & serverless) and I did well in that according to the interviwer

Round 3 : Coding [45 min]
Array medium level question related to subarrays
LinkedList medium level question present in top 50 LinkedList questions here

Was able to solve both of them, Interviewer was happy and I got notification for further 2 rounds

Round 4 : Coding [45 mins]
Again 2 questions here

1. A Backtracking medium LC question
2. A popular caching LC medium question

Was able to solve both in the time given.

Round 5 : Behavioral [45 mins]
This was again with the Director and had standard Behavioral questions. The agenda was to find if i would be a good fit for the team.

Final verdict : Offer!!
The interview experience was very good as the interviewers were very polite. In some of the rounds, I felt like communication and problem solving skill was given more preference than coding, as in some of the interviewers asked me just to implement pseudocode. But I wrote the complete code along with boundary and edge cases neverthless as I was fast enough from my FB preparation last year.

General Strategy for Coding Rounds:

1. Requirement clarification when you first get the question
2. Present a brute force solution first. But don't code it, but tell the big O
3. Present an optimized solution by working through examples using your intuition from solving questions like these from your experience (this is the reason why you should solve a large number of different questions rather than solve a large number of similar ones). Tell the Big O, don't code it yet.
4. If interviewer is fine with your solution, it's time to write the code. Before you do that, I suggest writing test cases where your solution should pass. Think about a good enough case and also edge and boundary cases.
5. Implement the solution and dry run your test cases.
6. Profit!

Key takeaways from my interviewing experience:

1. Interviewer is judging your coding skills, but he is also subconsiously judging you as a potential teammate.
2. You shouldn't code the first solution which comes to your mind. Only on the interviewers OK should you write the code.
3. Test cases and dry run are very important. Think about edge cases and boundary cases first, otherwise you get negative points + anxiety + more work to refactor if interviewer catches the bug. Also make it a habit to dry run in all your interviews. You will definitely get extra points.
4. Be polite :)

My Stats:

I'm not a competitive programmer.
I used java for all interviews

Preperation:
I got a call from FB last year but position in the last minute frozen due to hiring freeze. I essentially put myself into strain for 2 months by practicing FB tagged questions along with writing bug-free code in first attempt + dry run of test cases. I think this pushed my skills up a notch and I was more confident in my attempt for Salesforce.

Thanks to Leetcode community, one of the best platform. Thank you everyone and all the best!! And remember, this prep will take your patience and time, but it will be worth it. I got a 300%+ increase just due to this switch and the fruits of my prep came an year after :)

Thanks for reading and happy coding!
Cheers.