Salesforce | Software Engineering Intern | | Jan | Offer

I started applying for roles that I was interested in late in . Early in January , a Salesforce recruiter contacted me and asked me to take a coding test called Kula 101 on HackerRank. There were 3 questions and 75 minutes to solve. I don't remember all the questions. I ended up solving two questions completely and a third one partially.

1st Round

The interview was on Google Meet. I was also given a "CollabEdit" link. I could write code there and the interviewer could edit as well.

• I was first asked about my previous internships' work and other projects.
• First question - Word Ladder. I was already familiar with a similar question. But I started off with a BFS solution and in a subtle manner moved on to two way BFS. I wrote the code as well. Initially I missed out a few edge cases, but quickly corrected them.
• Second question was given an array of oranges and apples, and extra "m" apples and "m" oranges in your bag, replace the fruits in the array to maximize the number of similar fruits in consecutive places. I came up with an O(n^2) solution and then after some thought came up with a linear solution.

2nd Round

• The second round started off with discussing my interest. My resume was filled with Deep Learning stuff and he had apprehensions about whether I was open to work in "non-research" stuff. I had to clear that part to him.
• He then asked me to explain gradient descent to a 5 year old kid.
• He then asked if I could find non-gradient descent based algorithms in AI. I explained a few genetic algorithms.
• Then I was asked a data structure design question for a given set of operations. The operations were "Set A 10", "Count 10", "Get A", "Delete A". I came up with a 2 unordered_map solution and he was happy with that.
• On top of the operations above, he asked me what changes I would have to make if it had to support scope i.e. I should be able to define start and end of scopes and all the changes between start and end of a scope should not affect outside of a scope. I came up with a crude stack based solution and perfected it after interaction with the interviewer.

3rd Round The 3rd round was more of an HR round. I was asked cliched questions like "Why Salesforce?", "What would you do in blah blah blah situation?" to get to know my personality I guess. I was honest and he seemed to be happy with it.

Result - I ended up receiving an acceptance mail finally.