Mission
Free interview prep that doesn't paywall the basics.
The tech job market is hard enough already. The prep tier shouldn't be a second hurdle. Most of what candidates need to walk into an interview ready, common questions, salary expectations, a clean CV, exists somewhere on the open internet, but it's scattered, dated, hidden behind subscriptions, or buried under ads. Ace Hired is an attempt to put the useful parts in one place, free, and keep it useful.
We make money through ads and a small set of affiliate links to tools we'd recommend anyway. There's no paid tier and no plan to add one. See the affiliate disclosure for details.
Who's behind this
Ace Hired is built, owned, and maintained by one named person: Vikas Dulgunde, a software engineer with around six years of experience, primarily in JavaScript and Node, currently studying for an MSc in Computer Science, based in London, UK. This is not a faceless content farm or an anonymous brand. There is a real engineer behind the site, and that engineer's name is on it.
I built Ace Hired partly because I was using my own prep system across job searches and figured I should just turn it into a public site, and partly because the existing options (Glassdoor cluttered with ads, LeetCode paywalled, question banks scattered across Reddit threads and old blog posts) all have gaps. Combining a vetted question database with city-level salary data, ATS tooling, and resume templates in one place, with no signup, seemed worth doing.
You can reach me directly at team@palenebula.com, or Connect on LinkedIn.
Why a software engineer building this matters
The tools on this site (the ATS resume checker, the offer evaluator, the salary comparison, the date and time utilities, the text utilities) are pieces of working software. They are built by someone who builds software for a living. That is the relevant first-hand expertise: I am not claiming to be a recruiter, a careers coach, or an economist, and you will not find a fabricated job title anywhere on this site. What I can do is build accurate, fast, no-tracking-required web tools and write honestly about the engineering interview process from the inside, because building tools and sitting interview loops are both things I actually do.
That is also why the methodology is transparent rather than hand-waved. Every tool's logic is documented: how the ATS checker scores a resume, how the offer evaluator places an offer against published percentile data, where each salary figure comes from. If a number on the site can be checked against a primary source, the source is cited so you can check it. The full editorial and tooling methodology is on the editorial standards page.
Editorial process
Every interview question on the site goes through three checks before it's published:
- Was it actually asked? Reported questions come from candidates who tell us they were asked them. We tag every reported question with the rough date and the role, and we sanity-check against multiple reports where we have them. Questions we write ourselves to fill gaps are tagged Synthesised so you can tell them apart at a glance.
- Is the sample outline what a strong candidate would actually say? Outlines aren't textbook answers. They're how a working engineer with the right level of experience would structure a response under interview conditions, with the trade-offs and gotchas an interviewer would expect them to raise.
- Are the follow-ups real? The follow-up prompts under each question are the second-round probes a competent interviewer would push on, based on what's reported and what we've seen in real loops.
When facts on a question change (a company changes its loop format, a question gets retired), we update the page and bump the lastUpdated date. Career advice is medium-YMYL territory and we treat it that way.
Why not Glassdoor or LeetCode
Glassdoor has scale but is bloated, ad-heavy, and increasingly noisy. Salary data is mixed in with employer reviews and aggressive interstitials. Questions are anonymous and rarely structured by role and topic in a useful way.
LeetCode is excellent for raw coding practice but paywalls company-tagged questions, system-design content, and most of what you actually want when you're prepping for a specific loop. It's also strictly a problem set: no salary data, no resume help, no company process information.
Ace Hired tries to combine the question database with comp data and CV tools in one place, structured by role and company, free at the point of use.
Experience, expertise, and trust
Career and interview content is sensitive (medium-YMYL: it affects your livelihood). I try to be honest about who's writing, on what authority, and how the content and tools are kept accurate.
- Long-form guides carry a visible author byline at the top with the writer's relevant experience.
- Synthesised questions are labelled as such; reported questions are labelled with role and approximate date.
- Salary data is aggregated from public filings, levels.fyi, and self-reported sources, with the sample size and source mix visible on each page.
- Primary sources are cited wherever one exists.
- The tools are built by a working software engineer, and the logic behind each one is documented rather than hidden.
The full version of this, how questions get vetted, how each tool works, how often things are reviewed, and how corrections are handled, lives on the editorial standards page.
If something is wrong, the fastest way to fix it is to tell me: team@palenebula.com. See the contact page for the correction template.
Stack
For the curious: Ace Hired is built on Next.js 15 with the App Router, TypeScript in strict mode, Tailwind v4, a Postgres database, and MDX for long-form content. Analytics is Plausible (cookieless). Code lives in a private repo; we may open-source pieces of it later.