Go Interview Structure

Summary: An interview guideline for practicing that increases your chance of passing a Go interview to 97.5% even you're a young non-native English speaker developer. Note that this structure is designed for my team where I know the interviewer quite well.

Answer interview's questions in a structure fashion has never been easy even with experienced developers. This is even more challenged with non-native English speakers like Vietnamese young developers. Sometime candidates talk too much or too little, or even make bad impression to interviewers by saying things they shouldn't say,... Those little things often lead to a failed interview.

For young and non-native English speaker developers in Vietnam, we need a simple structure so that they can learn and practice themselves. I created and applied successfully the interview structure below for more than 50 developers for Go developer position. Most of them are fresh graduate with less than 1 year of experience and the success rate of the interviews is more than 97.5%.

If you're a young Vietnamese developer who are trying to pass a Go interview, this guideline is for you. The guideline is provided as a template with some very basic rules so that you can use it for practicing with your mentors and easier to make your own styles.

General Notices #

Although the rules listed below are very basic, but a lot of people makes those mistakes. Hence make sure you are very clear the below rules before your interview:

Introduce Yourself And Projects You've Worked #

There are a plenty of ways to introduce yourself and an overview on what you have worked on. Through my experiences as mentors for more than a hundred of developers, providing enough key information is very important in the introduction.

I suggest to talk a very overview about your self and at most 2 or 3 relevant projects that you have worked on.

Describes A Project In Detail #

When talking about the detail of a project, the general guideline is to go from "overview" to "detail". Talking about the overview first to make sure the interviewers know the big picture of the project, and talking about the detail to show them your deep knowledge of the project.

Talk About The Exam #

Some customers request candidate to take a coding exam before the interview, hence you must be clear on what you've done.

Other Technologies #

Some interviewers might interested in relevant technologies and the list of the technologies can be varied depend on project's requirements.

The ground rules for answer these questions is that you must know how you used those technologies in detail. If you don't know, just admit that you don't know. If you know some similar technologies, talk about them to the interviewers so that he/she can understand that you can learn it quickly.

Some interviewers also interested some fundamental information like:

  1. What version of the technology you are using?
  2. What did you use the technologies for? And why?
  3. Why don't you use technology X instead of technology Y.
  4. What library did you use in your project? Why did you choose it instead of another?

In most of the interviews for Go position that I'm the mentor, they often ask for below technologies:

Questions About Go #

Although there are many questions an interview can ask a candidate about Go, I found more than 95% interviewers ask below questions when it comes to Go specific questions.

Reverse Interview #

Final Notes #

What next? #

If you want to read more about common interview process, I recommend you to take a look at this page: https://techinterviewhandbook.org