I have an upcoming Golang interview, and I want to make sure I am fully prepared. I have been working with Go for some time.., but I would love to hear from experienced developers about the types of questions I might face.
I have also gone through Golang Interview Questions guide and I didn’t understand Q no. 20 and Q no. 23. Could you guys share some common questions that are frequently asked for roles like backend developer, cloud engineer, or system programmer: ?? Also, any recommendations for solid resources to sharpen my skills: ??
Some areas I think I should focus on:
Concurrency and Goroutines
Interfaces and Structs
Error Handling Best Practices
Memory Management in Go
Performance Optimization
If anyone has recently gone through a Golang interview, your insights would be super valuable !! Also, any tricky or unexpected questions that caught you off guard: ??
I recently had a couple of interviews as a freelance technical auditor.
The portfolio projects mentioned by Silbert were very important. Because they provide a good starting point for the questions. My strategy is to first ask questions that the candidate can answer: Thus I talk about the portfolio project, about design decisions, find out how well it was understood and planned, ask about optimizations, problems that arose, next steps and so on.
Then a round of questions begins, but I don’t expect the candidate to know everything. I also ask questions whose answers I don’t know and see if the candidate can explain them to me.
Those questions are the most unexpected as I myself do not know them beforehand.
Nobody really has to code live or anything like that with me. I do let them show me the screen, but more to briefly see how the candidate operates their own computer.
I don’t find the standard interview questions useful. They’re just rote learning things.
One last thing: There is no “best” candiates. I do a ranking, but for me there is really suitable or not as there are many other things to consider for the company and a fixed position is there so that the candidat can still learn specific stuff in the future. So there is also the question if he will be able to and not if he already knows.
Great post, Joseph! It’s awesome to see you’re preparing so thoroughly. You’ve already listed key areas like concurrency, interfaces, and performance tuning—these are must-know topics, especially for backend or cloud roles.
For your specific Q20 & Q23 confusion from the Golang Interview Questions guide, can you share what those questions are? Maybe the community can break them down in simpler terms.
A few common questions I’ve seen in interviews lately:
How do Goroutines and channels work internally? What’s the difference between buffered and unbuffered channels?
Explain the context package and how you’d handle cancellations or timeouts in a service.
Can you explain the difference between a pointer receiver vs. a value receiver?
How does garbage collection work in Go, and how do you optimize memory usage?
Have you worked with Go modules and dependency management?
Unexpected/tricky one I faced: “Can you write a simple in-memory rate limiter?” That caught me off guard initially.
For practice, besides building APIs or tools, I also recommend trying out utility projects like a speed calculator (e.g., audiobook speed or time estimators) in Go—it’s great for brushing up on precision handling, input validation, and testing.
For resources:
“Go Proverbs” by Rob Pike (must-read for mindset)
Go by Example (simple and practical)
Uber’s Go Style Guide (for writing clean code)
Leetcode/Gophercises (for hands-on drills)
Good luck—you’ve got this! Anyone else have tips or links to share?
It’s awesome to see you’re preparing so thoroughly. 
You’ve already listed key areas like concurrency, interfaces, and performance tuning—these are must-know topics, especially for backend or cloud roles.
That caught me off guard initially.
Anyone else have tips or links to share?