An in-house recruiter reached out to me via LinkedIn. We had a pleasant 30-minute discussion, but this was mostly to make sure I was a real person who could talk in complete sentences.

I wanted to wrap up a project at my current job, so I asked the recruiter to check back in 8 weeks. He did. Key point? I made a simple request, and he responded (i.e., no spammy follow-ups).

The phone screen was run by Karat.io. The process seemed fair, but not having done a real technical challenge in years, I froze and made all the classic mistakes. The problem was enough; I just panicked.

I'm guessing here, but I would say that Indeed's policy is to source as many people as possible and screen out many via their phone screen.

To be honest, I think that's a great policy. I have a degree in journalism and have coded for 10+ years at a non-profit, so I'm not the typical candidate job-hopping around top-100 internet companies.

The interview indicated very clearly what I would be judged on: correctness and, slightly, efficiency.

Given a list of lists, iterate over them and detect if a certain pattern exists. I froze, and bombed.

After the call, I solved it in 3 minutes (naive n^2)... sigh. I'm pretty sure if I got it right, they would have changed the pattern such that it required a BFS solution.