TL;DR I failed the phone screen. If you want to pass it, try the following:

• Find questions marked "Indeed" on LeetCode.
• Study them to the point where you can code the optimal solution from memory. Make sure to focus specifically on the questions marked Indeed.
• During the interview, focus on getting the complete solution running in the allotted time. That is literally the only thing that matters. Don't worry too much about explaining your approach, other than a small summary before you code.
• There are some general knowledge questions at the start. Be ready for this, but they are probably easy-ish for most engineers and are not nearly as important as the coding portion.

More info...

I didn't pass the phone interview, mainly because I took the wrong approach to studying. I basically tried to go through as many LeetCode questions as possible so that I would be ready for any random question that pops up. A lot of companies and interviewers (e.g., our lord and savior Gayle Laakman McDowell) aren't necessarily interested in a running solution. They mainly want to see your thought process and approach to solving difficult problems.

Indeed appears to take a different approach, at least for the phone interviews. In my case, it was an exact question from LeetCode and had even been tagged as an Indeed interview question. They expected to have a fully running version of it coded in less than 45 minutes. I had gone over it a bit but figured it might not be used since it had already been leaked. Big mistake. Companies I've worked for in the past would discard questions after they got leaked and switch them out for new ones. They did this because they wanted to see a candidate's approach to problem-solving instead of their ability to memorize LeetCode questions that had been leaked on Glassdoor. Instead of studying a bunch of random questions, I should have just been studying the specific Indeed questions from LeetCode and making sure that I could code the optimal solution quickly from memory.

Keep in mind they do their phone screens through a third-party, so it's pretty impersonal. All they care about is a running solution. It's basically like interviewing with a machine rather than a person. They don't care if you've seen the problem or not. You do have to explain your approach a bit before you start coding, but after that, they don't care about your thought process once you get started (I shouldn't have taken your advice there, Gayle). You could honestly probably have the solution to the problem up next to your editor and just copy it as you go, but if you have to do that, I'm assuming you would seriously bomb the "on-site," as well as it just being unethical.

I guess it makes sense that they would take this approach. This company is growing rapidly, and with as many interviews as they do, it's probably impossible to keep questions from getting leaked. My guess is they just picked a more difficult leaked question so that people would at least have to memorize something with some meat on it before moving on to the next step. The sad thing is, the only trick to it is knowing the information I just gave you. How that correlates with success in the workplace, I'm not really sure.

Overall, my impression of Indeed is mixed. I know it's a great place to work, and I'm sure they pay really well. Maybe it's just sour grapes, but I found this corporate meat grinder approach to be off-putting. The fact that a Glassdoor post like this could be the difference between passing and not passing makes me feel like the bureaucracy at this company has gotten pretty thick and impersonal as it has gotten bigger. I guess I won't find out if that's a good thing or not, but for my part, I'll definitely target smaller companies going forward.

A question from LeetCode, marked with the Indeed tag.

There are 5 of them at the time of this writing.