I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in May 2011
Interview
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 [1]
Question 1
sorting/merging on whiteboard, efficiency and tradeoffs of algorithms, Oracle basics and tuning, corner cases for Java (lang, deployment, etc), OS internals/operations, describe previous experience in extreme situations...
I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2009
Interview
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
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Salesforce (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2009
Interview
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 [1]
Question 1
The number of paths in a m x n grid to a given cell? (After looking it up I noticed the interviewer actually asked the question incorrectly). So, always ask for more details if things are unclear.