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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

November 1, 2009
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

The interview process involved an hour-long technical interview, followed by a six-hour on-site interview. This included a session with a senior engineer, a two-hour programming exercise on a laptop, an hour for lunch, an hour with the hiring manager, and an hour with two junior developers. The questions primarily focused on data structures and algorithms, with some SQL components. The staff were courteous, although the questions felt somewhat artificial. For instance, a grid path question was posed incorrectly (which I later verified), and the junior developers struggled to articulate the exact problems they were asking for solutions to.

I did not receive an offer. The position was actually a step down for me, moving into development, so my on-the-spot whiteboard coding may not have met their expectations. It appears I'll need to take my years of experience designing enterprise-level software elsewhere. Additionally, I hadn't actively job searched in a long time, so my preparation was not complete.

Questions

The number of paths in an 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.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 40 interview experiences for the Salesforce Senior Software Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

57%
Pass Rate

Salesforce's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is on the easier side as most engineers get an offer after going through it.

Experience Rating

Positive75%
Neutral10%
Negative15%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Salesforce's Senior Software Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

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