The guide uses a long list of terms that a reader is expected to know and that no recruiter will stop to explain. This glossary keeps the 114 that two or more lessons rely on; a term used in one lesson only is defined in that lesson. Each entry is a sentence or two, as the lessons define it, with the lesson that teaches it. Where a lesson hedges because sources disagree, the entry keeps the hedge.
How to use itTerms are in alphabetical order. The last column names the lesson that teaches the term, numbered 0 to 14 as printed. Entries repeat the lessons and add nothing to them: for a rule that matters to you, read the lesson and check your own letter. This is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice.
A
Table: Term, Meaning, See (6 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Ambiguity | How vague a problem you can be handed, from a defined problem to one you find yourself. It is one of the four rows the guide uses to compare levels. | lesson 1 |
| Annexure | The page of an offer or CTC letter that lists every pay line. Sort each line into cash that arrives monthly, cash that arrives once or conditionally, and things that are not cash. | lesson 0, lesson 13 |
| Applicant tracking system (ATS) | Recruiting software whose parser fills a candidate record from your file and which recruiters search and review. The vendor pages read describe no hidden score that rejects resumes automatically. | lesson 3 |
| Appointment letter | The document that sets your terms, including notice and probation. The government's release on the Labour Codes describes appointment letters as mandatory. | lesson 0, lesson 4 |
| Ask your AI card | A boxed prompt you give an AI model about your own documents, followed by what a good answer contains so you can check it. | the prompt kit (appendix) |
| Author's reading | The guide's label for a point where no primary source was found or sources disagree. Treat such a line as a question to ask, not an answer. | every lesson |
Next stop: B, 1 min
B
Table: Term, Meaning, See (8 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Background verification (BGV) | A check, usually run by a vendor, on identity, education, past employment, address and sometimes records. The vendor compares your declared dates with your letters and your UAN history. | lesson 14 |
| Band | The pay range attached to a level. Moving money inside the band is one conversation; moving the band means changing the level. | lesson 1, lesson 4 |
| Bar Raiser | Amazon's term for an interviewer brought in as an objective third party from outside the hiring team. The Bar Raiser and the hiring manager decide together. | lesson 10 |
| Basic | The core salary line. Your PF is 12 per cent of it (plus DA), and HRA exemption is worked from it. | lesson 2 |
| Behavioural round | An interview that asks for past events, which the interviewer writes down and files under competencies against a written rubric. | lesson 10 |
| Bond | A minimum-service agreement with a payment for leaving early. The Supreme Court upheld one in 2025 as reported, but it has to be proportionate to a real cost; ask a lawyer about yours. | lesson 2, lesson 14 |
| Builder | A pattern in which a separate object assembles a product with many optional parts step by step. Skip it when three or four fields will do. | lesson 7 |
| Buyout | You pay your employer an amount in place of working the rest of your notice, and the employer releases you. The formula is policy or negotiated. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: C, 1 min
C
Table: Term, Meaning, See (12 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| CAP | The trade-off a replicated store faces when the network splits: refuse some requests to stay consistent, or answer on both sides and merge later. | lesson 8 |
| Career ladder | A published description of a company's levels. Only a few companies publish one, and none was found for an Indian product company. | lesson 1 |
| CDN (content delivery network) | Edge servers near readers that keep copies of cacheable responses; a miss goes to the origin. | lesson 8 |
| Cess | A 4 per cent charge on tax plus surcharge. | lesson 2 |
| Chartered accountant (CA) | The person the guide sends you to for your tax return and for any point marked as the author's reading. | lesson 2 |
| Clawback | A rule that you repay a bonus, in full or pro rata, if you leave within a set period. Ask whether repayment is gross or net of tax. | lesson 2, lesson 13 |
| Cliff | A waiting period before any units vest. Your grant letter and plan decide it. | lesson 2 |
| Code on Social Security | One of the four Labour Codes, in force from 21 November 2025. Gratuity is now read through it. | lesson 2 |
| Code on Wages | One of the four Labour Codes. Its section 17(2) requires wages due to be paid within two working days of resignation, as read. | lesson 2 |
| Command | A pattern that turns an operation into an object, for undo, queues and logs of operations. The cost is an extra layer. | lesson 7 |
| Competency | A named quality an interviewer scores your story against. Amazon publishes sixteen principles; Google's guide publishes a rubric, not a list of names. | lesson 10 |
| CTC (cost to company) | The employer's yearly total outlay on you, including salary, bonuses and benefits. It is not a legal term, and what it contains varies by company. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: D, 1 min
D
Table: Term, Meaning, See (3 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Dearness allowance (DA) | A pay component that, with basic and any retaining allowance, makes up EPF wages. | lesson 2 |
| Deductions | The payslip lines taken from you: your PF, professional tax and TDS. Gross minus deductions is net pay. | lesson 2 |
| Down-levelling | Offering a level below the one you applied for, usually when interviewers are unsure. No source gives how often it happens. | lesson 11, lesson 12 |
Next stop: E, 1 min
E
Table: Term, Meaning, See (5 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Early release | The employer agrees you may leave before the notice period ends, with no payment. | lesson 2 |
| EPFO | The provident fund body. It raised the wage ceiling from 15,000 to 25,000 a month from 17 September 2026. | lesson 2 |
| ESOP | The right to buy shares at a fixed price once vested. The perquisite arises on exercise and is the market value minus the exercise price. | lesson 2 |
| Exercise | Buying shares under an option at the exercise price. You may owe tax on the gap before you can sell, so the cash needed can be large. | lesson 2 |
| Expected CTC | The figure you give platforms and recruiters for your target pay. No platform page says whether the salary filter matches current or expected CTC. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: F, 1 min
F
Table: Term, Meaning, See (4 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Fan-out | Copying a post to each follower's timeline when it is written (push) or merging at read time (pull). Pull suits accounts with very many followers. | lesson 8 |
| Final settlement | The payment of dues at exit. Ask HR when it is issued and whether it depends on serving full notice. | lesson 2 |
| Fixed pay | Salary paid every month, including basic and allowances. It is the part you receive monthly before deductions. | lesson 2, lesson 13 |
| Form 16 | The tax certificate on your salary from an employer. Keep last year's, and ask payroll how a buyout would appear in Part B. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: G, 1 min
G
Table: Term, Meaning, See (5 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Global capability centre (GCC) | An India centre run by a global firm, including banks, retailers and other non-tech companies. It is part of the guide's fourth tier. | lesson 1, lesson 11 |
| Grade | A designation in an IT-services pyramid, such as TCS C2 or Infosys JL4. Years per grade vary by company and are not requirements. | lesson 1 |
| Grant letter | The document that sets your stock schedule, any cliff, and what happens to unvested units when you leave. | lesson 2, lesson 13 |
| Gratuity | A lump sum paid when you leave after enough service. The formula is monthly wages x 15 / 26 x completed years, payable on resignation only after five years of continuous service. | lesson 2 |
| Gratuity provision | The amount your CTC sets aside each year for gratuity. You get it only if you qualify, so it is not monthly money. | lesson 0, lesson 2 |
Next stop: H, 1 min
H
Table: Term, Meaning, See (5 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Heap | A structure that gives the extreme of a changing set, used for top k, k-th largest and merging k sorted lists. | lesson 6 |
| Hiring committee | A group that reads interview feedback in some companies. Whether one exists is the first thing to find out; Google's is known from candidate accounts here. | lesson 1 |
| Hiring manager | The person who will manage you. They decide whether there is a seat, at what level, and which gap you close. | lesson 11 |
| Hot partition | One partition that takes most of the traffic. Fixes are spreading the key, caching hot reads, or giving the key its own node. | lesson 8 |
| HRA (house rent allowance) | A pay component whose exemption exists only in the old regime. It is the least of HRA received, rent minus 10 per cent of salary, and 50 per cent (listed city) or 40 per cent of salary. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: I, 1 min
I
Table: Term, Meaning, See (7 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Idempotency key | A client-sent key that lets a service recognise a retry and not repeat the side effect. The processor keeps keys for a limited time, so bound your retries under it. | lesson 8 |
| In-hand | What reaches your bank: gross minus your PF, professional tax and TDS. Say your pay as an in-hand monthly figure. | lesson 0 |
| Income-tax Act, 2025 | The Act in force from 1 April 2026, replacing the 1961 Act. Its first tax year is 2026-27. | lesson 2 |
| Influence | Whose work changes because of you. It is one of the four rows used to compare levels. | lesson 1 |
| Interleaving | Mixing problem types in one session. The Dunlosky review rated it moderate utility. | lesson 5 |
| Intervals | A pattern for lists of start-end ranges: sort, then sweep to merge or count overlaps. | lesson 6 |
| INVENTED example | A box label meaning every person, company and figure in it is made up. | every lesson |
Next stop: J, 1 min
J
Table: Term, Meaning, See (1 row)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Joining bonus | A one-time payment, also called a sign-on bonus, usually with a clawback. It lands on top of salary, so far less than its face value survives tax. | lesson 2, lesson 13 |
Next stop: L, 1 min
L
Table: Term, Meaning, See (5 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Labour Codes | The four codes in effect from 21 November 2025 (Wages, Industrial Relations, Social Security, and Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions). They replace 29 older laws, and are only partly operational. | lesson 2 |
| Last working day | The day your service ends. Test the five-year gratuity line against it, not against the day you resign. | lesson 0 |
| Level | The rung that fixes your scope, band, and the start of your next raise. It is set twice: on the requisition, then after the loop. | lesson 1 |
| LLD (low-level design) | The design of classes and their behaviour, examined in a machine-coding round. | lesson 7 |
| Loop | The full set of interview rounds for one role. | lesson 1 |
Next stop: M, 1 min
M
Table: Term, Meaning, See (3 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Machine coding | A round that asks for a small running program with several classes, built in your own editor under a clock, then read by a stranger. | lesson 7 |
| Marginal rate | The rate on your next rupee of income. When taxable salary sits near 24 lakh, extra pay is taxed at 25 or 30 per cent. | lesson 2 |
| Marginal relief | Just above 12 lakh of taxable income in the new regime, tax is capped at the income above 12 lakh. It runs out at about 12,70,600. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: N, 1 min
N
Table: Term, Meaning, See (2 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| New regime | The default tax regime. It has lower rates, a 75,000 standard deduction and almost no deductions; the rebate makes tax nil up to 12 lakh of taxable income. | lesson 2 |
| Notice period | A contract term in your appointment letter, often 60 or 90 days. The author's reading is that for most engineers it is what the letter says. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: O, 1 min
O
Table: Term, Meaning, See (3 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Old regime | The tax regime with higher rates that allows the HRA exemption, professional tax, your PF (capped at 1.5 lakh) and other deductions. Neither regime is always better. | lesson 2 |
| Online assessment (OA) | An early screening step before live rounds, listed as an online assessment or phone screen in the global-firm loop. | lesson 6, lesson 14 |
| Open to Work | A LinkedIn setting with three visibility options. The India-only notice-period and expected-salary fields are visible to recruiters regardless. | lesson 3 |
Next stop: P, 1 min
P
Table: Term, Meaning, See (8 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| p99 | The 99th-percentile latency: the time under which 99 per cent of requests finish. Read the percentile, not the average. | lesson 8 |
| Partitioning (sharding) | Splitting a dataset so no node holds all of it. Choose the key the commonest query uses so one request touches one partition. | lesson 8 |
| Pay in lieu | The employer pays you in place of notice and ends the employment. Reports describe it as taxable salary with TDS. | lesson 2 |
| Perquisite | Salary-type income in kind. Shares from an employer are one, valued at fair market value minus what you paid. | lesson 2 |
| PF (provident fund) | A retirement account to which you contribute 12 per cent of EPF wages and your employer contributes too. Employer PF is inside your CTC but not in your bank. | lesson 2 |
| Pro-rata | A repayment or entitlement that shrinks or grows by month instead of a flat sum. | lesson 13 |
| Probation | A trial period set by your letter and policy, not a separate kind of employment. No source settled a general length; ask HR in writing. | lesson 14 |
| Professional tax | A state tax on salary. It cuts taxable salary only in the old regime. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: Q, 1 min
Q
Table: Term, Meaning, See (1 row)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Queue | A buffer that lets a producer hand work to a consumer without waiting. It absorbs bursts, and you then own delivery: at-least-once or exactly-once. | lesson 8 |
Next stop: R, 1 min
R
Table: Term, Meaning, See (10 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Rate limiter | A guard that protects a service from its own clients. Stripe's post describes four layers, and a token bucket allows bursts. | lesson 8 |
| Rebate (section 156) | In the new regime, tax up to 60,000 is cancelled when taxable income is 12 lakh or less. The old regime cancels up to 12,500 at 5 lakh or less. | lesson 2 |
| Referral | An employee's recommendation into the process. Ask with the job ID, two facts and an easy no. | lesson 3 |
| Relieving letter | A letter confirming the employer accepted your resignation and released you. No central law found requires one, and breaking notice or a bond can cost you the document. | lesson 13 |
| Replication | Keeping copies of the same data on several nodes so one can fail without data loss. | lesson 8 |
| Repository | A pattern in which the domain sees a collection and not the storage behind it. | lesson 7 |
| Requisition | The page written when a team is approved to hire. It names one level, and its pay band usually exists before any candidate is seen. | lesson 1 |
| Resdex | Naukri's recruiter database, searched by keywords and filters including notice period. | lesson 3 |
| Restraint of trade | Section 27 of the Contract Act voids agreements restraining a lawful profession. As reported, in-term restraints are generally not caught and post-employment covenants generally are. | lesson 2 |
| RSU (restricted stock unit) | A promise of shares delivered on a schedule, at no price. It is taxed on the vest date as a perquisite, whether or not you can sell. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: S, 1 min
S
Table: Term, Meaning, See (10 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Scope | How large a thing you own. It is the first row used to compare levels and what travels between employers. | lesson 1, lesson 12 |
| Seat | An approved, funded role. | lesson 11, lesson 12 |
| Serving notice | Working through the notice period to your last working day. | lesson 2 |
| Slab | A band of taxable income taxed at one rate. | lesson 2 |
| SOLID | Five questions to ask of a class: reasons to change, what to edit to add a feature, whether subtypes substitute, whether callers see unused methods, and whether a class builds its own collaborators. | lesson 7 |
| Spacing | Coming back to material after a gap. Distributed practice was rated high utility. | lesson 5 |
| Special allowance | The balancing line that makes the total reach the agreed CTC. | lesson 2 |
| Standard deduction | A flat deduction from salary: 75,000 in the new regime and 50,000 in the old. | lesson 2 |
| Story bank | Eight written stories covering every competency at least twice, each ending on a measured number. | lesson 10 |
| Surcharge | 10 per cent of tax above 50 lakh of income, rising at higher thresholds. None of the guide's examples crosses 50 lakh. | lesson 2 |
Next stop: T, 1 min
T
Table: Term, Meaning, See (6 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Tax year | The term in the 2025 Act that replaces financial year and assessment year. The first is 2026-27. | lesson 2 |
| TDS | Tax deducted at source: your employer withholds income-tax from salary each month. It moves as payroll re-estimates your year. | lesson 2 |
| Tier | One of four employer groups: IT services, Indian product companies, funded startups, and global firms' India centres. | lesson 1 |
| Token | A piece of a word that a model counts and works on; about four characters in Google's rule of thumb. Cost and the window are counted in tokens. | lesson 9 |
| Trie | A prefix tree for many strings that share prefixes, as in autocomplete. | lesson 6 |
| TTL (time-to-live) | How long a cached value lives before it expires. | lesson 8 |
Next stop: U, 1 min
U
Table: Term, Meaning, See (1 row)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Unvested | Units or options not yet yours. The plan decides what happens to them if you leave. | lesson 13 |
Next stop: V, 1 min
V
Table: Term, Meaning, See (2 rows)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Variable pay | A bonus or target incentive tied to performance. It is not monthly, so ask what it paid last cycle. | lesson 2 |
| Vest / vesting | The dates on which granted shares or options become yours. A typical schedule is four years with a first tranche after one year. | lesson 2, lesson 13 |
Next stop: W, 1 min
W
Table: Term, Meaning, See (1 row)
| Term | Meaning | See |
|---|
| Wages (Labour Codes) | A broader definition that feeds PF and gratuity. If allowances exceed 50 per cent of remuneration, the excess is added back for gratuity; ask HR which of your lines count. | lesson 2 |