The LastRound AI Blog
Interview prep, tech careers, and AI tools — from the team building the AI interview copilot.
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…
Technical Prep
The campus aptitude round, and how to actually prepare for it
On 6 September 2026 I opened faceprep’s pattern pages for the Deloitte and CoCubes campus aptitude tests as part of aptitude test preparation research,…
Certifications
PMP certification, and who it is actually built for
On 6 September 2026 I opened pmi.org/certifications/project-management-pmp and pmi.org/blog/pmp-certification directly to check what a PMP certification actually requires and costs. The eligibility numbers are…
Certifications
Azure certification, and the case Microsoft actually has
On 6 September 2026 I opened Microsoft Learn’s certification pages directly, the Azure Administrator Associate page and the renewal page, to see what an…
Interview Questions
The API gateway questions a systems-design round actually asks
On 6 September 2026 I opened Kong’s own gateway documentation to check exactly what a real gateway claims to do, because a lot of…
Interview Questions
Android interviews in 2026: what’s still asked and what’s fading
On 6 September 2026 I opened Android’s own coroutines documentation to check a number before writing this, and found something worth repeating to anyone…
Interview Questions
What a Selenium interview is actually testing for
On 6 September 2026 I opened the official Selenium docs page on waits to check one specific claim before writing this, because half the…
Interview Questions
A React question bank sorted by what the interviewer is actually checking
On 6 September 2026 I opened the official React 19 release notes at react.dev and counted the headline changes: Actions, the new use API,…