This page documents how everything on Ace Hired is made: where the data comes from, how questions are vetted, how each tool works, how often things are reviewed, and how mistakes get fixed. The short version is that the methodology is transparent on purpose. If a number or a claim on this site cannot be traced back to a source or a documented method, it should not be here.
Who is accountable
Ace Hired is built, owned, and maintained by Vikas Dulgunde, a software engineer with around six years of experience (primarily JavaScript and Node), currently studying for an MSc in Computer Science, based in London, UK. The full bio is on the about page.
That matters for two reasons. First, accountability: there is one named person responsible for what is published here, not an anonymous brand. Second, relevant expertise: the tools on this site are working software, built by someone who builds software for a living, and the engineering interview content is written from the perspective of someone who has sat on both sides of technical interview loops. We do not claim to be recruiters, careers coaches, economists, or lawyers, and you will not find a fabricated job title, degree, or "reviewed by Dr. X" line anywhere on the site. The authority claimed here is exactly the authority that exists: first-hand software-engineering experience.
How interview questions are vetted
Every interview question goes through three checks before it is published.
- Was it actually asked? Reported questions come from candidates who say they were asked them. Each reported question is tagged with the rough date and the role, and is sanity-checked against multiple reports where they exist. Questions written in-house to fill a gap are labelled Synthesised so you can always tell a reported question from an authored one.
- Is the sample outline what a strong candidate would actually say? Outlines are not textbook answers. They describe how a working engineer at the right level would structure a response under interview conditions, including the trade-offs and gotchas an interviewer expects to hear raised.
- Are the follow-ups real? The follow-up prompts under each question are the second-round probes a competent interviewer would actually push on, based on what is reported and what shows up in real loops.
When the facts behind a question change (a company changes its loop format, a question is retired), the page is updated and the lastUpdated date is bumped.
How salary data is sourced
Salary figures are aggregated from public, citable sources, not invented:
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, which is public domain.
- UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Levels.fyi and other self-reported aggregates, cited under editorial fair use for the components they cover.
Each salary page shows the source mix and, where available, the sample size, so you can judge how much weight to put on a figure. Percentile distributions (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th) are presented as published; the site does not smooth, extrapolate, or fabricate intermediate points beyond clearly labelled interpolation inside the tools. Salary figures are market reference data, not an offer, a guarantee, or financial advice. See the disclaimer that appears on every salary surface, and the affiliate disclosure for how the site is funded.
How the tools work
The tools are built in-house and their logic is documented rather than hidden behind a black box.
- ATS resume checker. Runs a deterministic set of formatting and content heuristics (parseability, section structure, contact details, action verbs, quantification, length, file hygiene) against the uploaded resume in the browser. It reports what it found and why, so the result is explainable rather than a single opaque score. It is an automated first pass, not a recruiter and not a guarantee of an interview.
- Offer evaluator. Annualises base, equity, bonus, and signing into one comparable figure, then places that figure against the published percentile band for the role, city, and seniority drawn from the salary sources above. The benchmark and its sample size are shown alongside the verdict, and the verdict is derived from where the offer sits on the published percentiles, not from a made-up confidence number.
- Salary comparison and time and text utilities. Compute their results directly from their inputs using documented formulas. They are deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same output, and nothing is randomised or padded to look more authoritative.
If a tool cannot answer a question accurately, the honest answer is to say so rather than to guess.
Authorship and bylines
Long-form guides carry a visible author byline at the top of the page, with the writer's relevant experience stated plainly. The author is also encoded in each article's structured data (Article schema with a real Person author), and the site as a whole carries Person and Organization structured data naming the owner as founder. None of these signals assert anything that is not literally true.
Review and corrections
Content is reviewed when the underlying facts change and on a rolling basis. The Last updated date on each page reflects the last substantive change, not an automatic timestamp.
Corrections are taken seriously and acted on quickly. If something is wrong (a misattributed question, a stale figure, a broken tool result, a typo), the fastest way to get it fixed is to email team@palenebula.com. The contact page has a short correction template that makes verification faster. Valid corrections are made promptly and, where the change is material, the lastUpdated date is bumped so you can see the page has moved.
What this site is not
To be explicit about the limits of the expertise here: Ace Hired does not give personalised financial, legal, tax, or immigration advice, does not offer one-to-one coaching or mock interviews, and does not broker job applications or referrals. It is free reference content and free tools, built and maintained transparently by a named software engineer. For anything that needs a licensed professional, see one.