A Salesforce recruiter initially contacted me via LinkedIn a few months ago. At the time, I was not looking, so I held onto the contact. The recruiter was more than happy to talk to me later, when I was more interested.

There was an initial screen with a recruiter or HR person. This was followed by a technical phone screen with two people via speakerphone, with non-American accents. The speakerphone and accents made it difficult to perceive how they were responding to me and to understand their questions, but it went well enough to make it to the interview. If I went through this process again, I would request they take me off the speakerphone, since this was the bulk of my difficulty.

The interview consisted of:

• 15 HR introduction
• 15 minute introduction to the interview from an engineer
• ~60 minute programming test, with a laptop in a room by yourself, so you can concentrate
• (4) technical 1-hour interviews
• a lunch interview with the hiring manager (culture fit, career goals, etc)

Some of the technical interviews took place with people in the office; others I video-conferenced with in San Francisco. They said many of the teams were split between San Francisco, and video-conferencing worked well for that, so it should be fine for the interview.

The interview experience was a mixed bag. Some of the interviewers were very pleasant and social; others were largely silent and read your resume while you talked at them. If I was confused by a question or dead-ended at a question, some of the interviewers just sat there silently; others would give a small hint, so you could continue with the question and gather a better idea of the candidate's depth on the topic.

Many interviewers mentioned a good "work-life" balance. It was noted the company used Scrum on all development teams. Everyone seemed to be pleased with their Scrum implementation, so I assumed that they had implemented it somewhat well.

Salesforce declined to extend an offer via a brief email a day or two later.

Write a Java function that reverses a string and write unit tests for it.

Write a Java function that counts the number of "words" in a string, where words are only delimited by space characters (no punctuation, very basic). Write unit tests for this function.