I was contacted by a recruiter through an employee referral. The recruiter mistakenly sent my resume to the wrong team. I spoke with the manager and only then realized our precious time had been wasted.

The recruiter then had me fill out another form for a different team. I was told the manager would contact me and that there would be no coding challenge in the first interview, so no screen share would be needed. When the manager called, who had only 5 years of industry experience (I checked his LinkedIn), he requested me to share my screen. This was a bummer, as the recruiter had said otherwise. Luckily, I was in front of my computer screen.

I cleared the first interview. The second interview was a programming challenge on HackerRank. It's the worst software because you can't debug your code. It's a timed test, and I'm not sure how to ensure the code works. In any case, I wasn't able to make the code work as I couldn't debug it. The instructions in the test were pretty esoteric. However, that's the same experience for everyone, so no complaints.

The manager called after I submitted the test and really wanted me to run the code and show it working. He never asked about my approach, the data structures or algorithms used, etc. The code didn't work, and I should have been rejected right then and there. But no, the manager wanted to have more fun. He gave me a deadline of 5 hours to make it work and changed some requirements. Beat that. I was sincere enough to finish it before the deadline and emailed him. This time around, I made it work, and all tests were passing. I emailed him the code.

He never called back to discuss the code, even though it worked. Did he not understand the code? Did he not run it in the right way? Did he not want to talk to me again because he stopped liking me? I have no clue. I was told by the person who referred me that nobody is allowed to give deadlines like that and make candidates redo the code, then not even discuss it. This talks about how inexperienced the manager was. Again, if these people at Salesforce want to have some fun at the candidates' expense by doing these weird things, they should stop interviewing. This was weirdly strange.

Later on, I got a voice message from the recruiter stating that I didn't meet the bar. However, he said he would upload my second submission for other teams to look at.

Remote programming challenge.

Some Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) problem.