The PrepHike blog
Notes from the middle of a search.
Practical writing on interviews, debriefs, system design and negotiation, for engineers in India who are interviewing while still working.
- Why skilled engineers in India stay underpaid, and how to fix it The problem is rarely your skill. It's that the market never sees it clearly. Here's why, and a step-by-step fix to land a real hike. Career / Salary
- Find your real market value: the audit underpaid engineers skip Am I underpaid as a software engineer in India? Run the Surface audit: benchmark your skills to market pay and set a grounded, defensible target package. Career / Salary
- The resume strategy that beats the ATS (Google XYZ formula) XYZ resume formula for software engineers in India: write ATS-friendly, results-first bullet points that survive keyword screens and you can defend in the interview. Resume
- How to answer "tell me about this project" (the 30-second method) Learn how to answer "tell me about this project" in interviews: a 30-second spoken answer plus a technical deep dive on architecture, trade-offs, and ownership for India engineers. Interviews
- STAR stories that don't sound rehearsed STAR method examples for behavioral interviews in India. Build conflict, failure, ownership and impact stories from real work, with numbers, that sound natural not scripted. Interviews
- Build a skill Q&A bank: prep for the questions recruiters actually ask Build a skill Q&A bank before your next interview. Learn how to prepare for technical interviews in India by turning every resume skill into recruiter questions. Interviews
- System design interview: a senior engineer’s checklist System design interview prep for engineers in India: a senior's checklist covering scope, capacity estimation, data model, caching, queues, failure handling, and trade-offs. System design
- Are you actually interview-ready? A mock-interview rubric Wondering "am I ready for interview"? Use this 6-part mock interview readiness rubric to self-score scoping, communication, correctness, trade-offs, STAR and composure. Interviews
- How to negotiate a salary hike in India (without an offer war) Salary negotiation in India without an offer war: set your market value, counter the first number, handle "best offer," and read CTC vs fixed gross. Salary
- The post-interview debrief loop that compounds Turn interview rejections into a repeatable improvement loop. A debrief system for Indian software engineers (2-6 yrs) to fix gaps before the next round. Interviews
- .NET interview prep for engineers in India .NET interview prep for engineers in India: real ASP.NET Core, EF Core, microservices and Azure questions enterprise and GCC panels actually ask, with answers. .NET
- Data engineering interview prep for engineers in India Data engineering interview prep for engineers in India: SQL, Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, dimensional modeling and SCD. What panels actually probe, with examples. Data engineering
- Full-stack and applied-AI interview prep (JS/TS) in India Full-stack JS/TS plus applied-AI interview prep for India: Node, React, databases, Redis, queues, LLM integration, RAG, and agentic pipelines product panels test. Full-stack / AI