The LastRound AI Blog
Interview prep, tech careers, and AI tools — from the team building the AI interview copilot.
Career Advice
The Math Behind the Date on Your Relieving Letter
Type a resignation date into LastRound AI’s notice period calculator and set the notice to 30 days, and on 6 September 2026 it returned…
Salary & Compensation
The Fine Print That Turns a Signing Bonus Into a Loan
A joining bonus clawback clause is the two or three sentences near the bottom of the offer letter that turn a signing bonus into…
Career Advice
The Document That Actually Governs Your Job, and When It Kicks In
An offer letter and an appointment letter get treated as the same piece of paper in most hallway conversations about a new job, and…
Career Advice
The Fine Print That Costs More Than a Bad Salary Number
Say a candidate gets a written offer on a Tuesday and signs it that same afternoon, before reading past the CTC number printed in…
Salary & Compensation
The Least-of-Three Rule Behind Every House Rent Allowance Claim
Rules verified against the Income Tax Department’s own new-vs-old-regime FAQ page on 7 September 2026, which states, in close to these exact words, that…
Salary & Compensation
Reading an Indian Payslip Without Guessing What Each Line Does
An Indian offer letter usually lists ten or so line items under CTC. The payslip that shows up in your inbox every month lists…
Salary & Compensation
What 10 LPA, 15 LPA and 20 LPA Actually Pay You Each Month
On 6 September 2026 I ran LastRound AI’s CTC to in hand salary calculator with an 18,00,000 rupee CTC, a Karnataka posting, and 2,00,000…
Salary & Compensation
Why the same engineering title pays four different numbers in India
The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey put an engineering manager’s median pay at $52,308 in India against $200,000 in the US for the same…
Technical Prep
An honest review of Grokking the Coding Interview’s pattern method
On 6 September 2026 I opened educative.io’s course page and its pricing page for Grokking the Coding Interview Patterns three separate times, looking for…
Technical Prep
Does Cracking the Coding Interview still hold up in 2026?
In January 2025, Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the same person who wrote Cracking the Coding Interview back in 2011, co-wrote a full successor instead of…