Salesforce | Hyderabad | March-April 2020 | Rejected in Round 2
Anonymous User
5144

Status: ~14 years experience as Java/C# Developer and QA
Position: Lead/Senior Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce
Location: Hyderabad
Date: March 21, 2020

Submitted my resume in response to a job opening on LinkedIn.
Directly received an email invite to HackerRank Aloha5 Coding Challenge after some 7-10 days of applying.

About the test:
Date : 21 March 2020
90 minutes
2 coding problems - both are there on LeetCode
Problem 1 : https://leetcode.com/problems/repeated-substring-pattern/description/
Problem 2 : https://leetcode.com/problems/largest-number/description/

Significant points:

  1. Webcam will be forced to be ON, and the site clearly declares that activities will be recorded periodically. My environment didn't force fullscreen.
  2. HackerRank environment supports fantastic Intellisense - as good as working in real IDE.
  3. The environment has 3 buttons - Run, Run all testcases and Submit.
  4. Even after clicking Submit, you can come back to the problem and fix your solution as many times as you wish, if you have time left.

I was able to finish off both with 30 minutes left, as I struggled with 2nd problem a bit.
I used the leftover time to format the code, add decent amount of comments and explanation of time complexity etc.

Finally clicked "Submit Test" with 16 minutes still left.

UPDATE : (31 March 2020) - Got an automated email with tips for preparing for in-person interview. Here is the link in the automated email https://www.salesforce.com/company/careers/candidate-resources/

UPDATE : 2 April 2020
Had a telephonic interview.

Problem 1 : https://leetcode.com/problems/next-greater-element-iii/
Problem 2 : https://leetcode.com/problems/reorganize-string/

I struggled in both.
Problem 1 : Covered many cases but not cases like 2371
Problem 2 : Barely 15 minutes left.

Worst part about the interviewer : He was simply not letting me explain any of my chain of thoughts and ideas - just kept showing off his over-smartness and barely allowed me to speak for both problems.

I had nothing to lose - so I simply told him sternly - Would you let me speak ? Would you let me explain any idea ? Only then I described my thought process.

Such a ridiculous fellow - was simply parroting that I want a consistent algorithm - and no handling of any category of cases !!
Summarily, he was not even letting me classify the types of inputs into 2-3 categories.

Dude, how the hell do you guys code ?
Every coding problem has inputs which can be usually classified into 2-3 patterns.

Obviously a Rejection.

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