Ten Golang Developer Interview Questions and How to Nail Them

Everyone wants to know what are the best questions to ask in a technical interview. You want to display your coding prowess, while still being able to show how well you can work with others on a team. You also want to make sure that you have enough experience with software development or architecture decisions so that the product talks don’t go too long and bore everyone else in the room.

There’s no shortage of questions out there about Golang interviews, but you should not be interested in those kinds of questions . Instead, you want more pragmatic and less fluffy advice that will help you get the job.

Question 1: What’s a code smell and how do you know when to refactor your code?

This is an excellent question because it forces the candidate to be specific. The interviewer can then point out how their answer doesn’t apply to all cases or how refactoring could have worked in this case. You answer this by listing a few code smells and how they are resolved. This way the interviewer can see that you know when it’s appropriate to refactor and what things you should watch out for.

The best possible answer would be if they have worked with C on kernel development or embedded programming because those environments tend to really never let you ever touch your code again after it goes into production.

Question 2: What’s a good unit test?

You answer this by explaining what a unit test is. You can also discuss how you would know if your test is accurate and what to look out for. You should also discuss what makes a unit test good and how you would know when to use them.

Question 3: What’s the difference between unit tests and integration tests?

This question because it forces candidates to define their terms and really think about the problem. It requires them to have done testing before or work on a team that’s done a lot of testing. Unit tests are smaller in scope and more focused on the code itself whereas integration tests tend to be bigger and cover more functionality but also tend to give fewer insights into where problems might arise.

Question 4: What is dependency injection?

This is an excellent question because it forces candidates to really think about how something works and understand its purpose. It also lets you see how they think about complex problems, while still keeping everything relatively simple. You answer this by walking through the process of dependency injection and what it helps with.

Question 5: How would you authenticate a Golang web API?

It’s an important question because it forces candidates to talk about the differences between application and network security, while also making sure that they are well versed in how authentication works. You answer this by talking about token based systems, ACLs, and how to use them with rate limiting.

Question 6: How do you atomically increment a Golang map?

This is a question because it shows how well the candidate thinks about complex problems. It forces them to really think about some of the nuances of Go’s interfaces and understand that they are different from other languages, while still keeping things relatively simple. You answer this by explaining how to accomplish it by manipulating the value in memory, without needing to touch the map.

Question 7: What do you know about Go’s hashing algorithms?

This makes sure that the candidate knows a little bit about some of Go’s internal functions and how they are used. You answer this by explaining how Golang uses MurmurHash and how it’s used for hashing. You should also discuss how it’s different from other hashing algorithms, while making sure that you can defend the differences.

Question 8: What is Go’s concurrency model and why is it important?

The Go team has been adamant about not inventing concurrency support from scratch but instead using an existing model that’s already well established. In fact, it draws upon a variety of these models including green threading, CSP and others; however, most people in the community cite its similarities to the actor model as being the single most important factor.

Concurrency is built into the language : unlike Java, C#, or other languages with a reputation for being “concurrent”, you don’t need to add a library or extension package to gain access to its concurrency features. It’s already there!

Question 9: Why is Go fast?

There are several reasons why Go is fast. One of the most important has to do with the fact that it’s compiled and statically linked . Once your code compiles, you can be pretty sure that there aren’t any bugs left in it. That speeds up a lot of development tasks because you don’t need to constantly keep rebuilding your code in order to check and see if there’s a bug or not.

It also provides an opportunity for embedding tests directly into the build process, thereby generating self-testing binaries. The fact that you don’t need a runtime environment like Java means that it’s possible to write very small binaries – even as little as 50 KB.

It’s also fast because it has better memory management . However, this is only true when your application is being garbage collected. It’s possible to force garbage collection and thereby speed things up (which we’ll talk about in a future article), but doing so means that you’re removing one of the language’s most important benefits – that it’s language-managed.

The idea is that the compiler should be able to detect which memory is being used and when it’s no longer in use. By forcing a garbage collection too often, you can actually hurt performance instead of improving it.

Question 10: Why would you make a good Go developer?

Here’s the most important thing to know about any job interview: it’s a chance for you to help them decide if they want you or not.

Question 10 is your opportunity to shine and explain why you’re an excellent candidate for the position – so make sure that you have good reasons prepared beforehand. Try not to speak too much about what you want; instead, focus on how you can make the company, team and other developers better.

If you’re also interested in practicing before you go for the real thing, make sure to practice with someone who has been there and done that, luckily several developers from the Golang community would be more than willing to help you out.