The initial referral was from someone working in product management; my own background is in protocol engineering and engineering management. We talked via email, and he forwarded one set of discussions to a senior person in their team; the senior person asked for an interview to be scheduled. The phone interview was quick, not highly technical and resulted in a scheduled one on one interview. That revealed something fairly interesting. Salesforce has trouble dealing with highly technical people who are not currently coders. Their engineering managers & CTOs are all coders (or at least, they represent themselves that way). Someone who had designed and deployed large scale systems but hadn't coded in production environments in years was hard to fit into their world view. After the interview, it was clear that I was far too much on the technical side to fit their product management team. They went off to think about how to fit me in, but came back a week or so later saying "we'd like to find something that works, but we can't". I suspect that had I said "of course I code" (and I certainly have done production-level code in the past), the result would have been a second set of interviews which might have gone further. I wouldn't encourage anyone to lie about their skills, but salesforce.com's view of engineering management as dependent on coding skills would certainly suggest not minimizing any skills you have there, should you be looking for engineering management jobs there.