About Go
Go is a statically typed programming language, open-source, compiled, efficient, readable, and high-performing.
It was created by Google to simplify the search engine’s codebases back in 2012.
Its popularity has continued ever since due to the features of running multiple tasks simultaneously, efficiency and simplicity.
Stats about Go
There are numerous surveys showing the popularity of Go from various aspects, starting from usage, brand names using Go, salaries, demand and more.
For example, some of the big brand names that use Go are Uber, PayPal, Meta, Bitly, Netflix, Dropbox, and many others.
Regarding the demand of Go developers, their precise vocational titles and salaries, as well as job openings, specifically in the USA, a full-stack developer with experience in Go, earns a salary of $101.959 per year, and for this position, there are fewer than 1868 job openings. Another example, a DevOps engineer with Go expertise, the estimated salary would be $118.395, and there are 1459 job openings, according to the stats.
But, in this context, regarding top paying technologies rank, Go is at 9th ranked place, with a $75.669 annual salary.
When it comes to choosing Go as the preferred language for programming, a hefty number of 10.000+ JavaScrip developers would choose either Go or Rust for their work. But, also, 14.54% of developers said they would want to work with Go.
Interviewing a Go developer
Helpful tips for a pre-screening interview
During the interview with the Go developer, a hiring specialist pays attention to several things to conduct the proper interview questions and get valuable information.
The interview specialist asks general questions to get to know the candidate and focuses on soft skills. They will also focus on checking their English proficiency, communicativeness, and responsiveness.
Top technical skills to look for in a Go developer
A great Go developer needs to understand the responsibilities assigned to them, such as:
- Creating and writing testable, scalable, efficient, robust codes that are easy to maintain
- Having the central deciding role in the design and architectural issues
- Translating all software requirements for the end goal of functioning, secure, and stable software of high-performance
Further, we asked senior Go & Java backend developer Diego Maia about critical technical skills in a Go (Golang) developer, to which he listed:
“Paying attention to creating clean code and following the SOLID principle (Single responsibility, open-closed, Liskov substitution, interface segregation, dependency inversion).”
But there are other skills essential for a Go developer to have:
- Strong knowledge about Goroutine and all channel patterns
- GraphQL
- Experience with constructs, paradigms, idioms about Go (Golang)
- Experience with Sltr and Godep (dependency management tools of Golang)
- Knowledge about the templating language of Golang
- Working with Stringer (Golang code generation tool)
- Experience with Gorilla Mux (router package)
- Experience with Revel (Golang web framework)
- Writing adequate and clean Godoc comments
- Knowledge about tools for code versioning, like SVN, Git, Mercurial
What distinguishes a great Go developer from a good one?
“A great Go developer needs to shine at working with error handling, pointers, and idiomatic Go codes,” added Maia.
Additionally, a great Golang developer will stand out if they have a variety of experiences and skills knowledge, such as PERL/Shell scripting.
Why and when do you need to hire a Go developer?
If you have a large project or complex workload especially, you need first to determine the preferred skills you expect of the developer.
How could you know when the right time to hire a Go developer for your project is? If your servers have to handle many requests with high traffic, this is one valid reason for complex workloads. Another reason is that it has an established business, so for heavy and challenging tasks and operations, Gol is good to go.
If your project or workload needs maximum functionality and speed, then you need a Go developer to maximize these factors in the long run.
How Proxify helps you find the best Go talent
No hiring process is hard to handle with the right professionals, and talents do not go unnoticed or slip through the cracks.
Proxify talent acquisition specialists devote their time to carefully select the suitable candidates for the interview stages through a simple, normative, and practical process:
- Self-assessment tasks for shortlisted candidates
- A scheduled call with the candidate to check the non-technical and soft skills along with professional skills
- A more concisely formulated assessment for the technical knowledge checking
- An interview call with an established and experienced Go developer
With a detailed interview, led by both talent acquisition and developers themselves, the process guarantees that it’s successful. More than one expert objectively evaluates the interviewing during the whole process.
Essentials and assessment of a Go developer
It is essential to know that the right candidate is communicative, responsive, has good English knowledge and proficiency, and has experience with Go.
An excellent example of assessment is assigning the developer the task of creating a small library. But also, a hiring specialist or expert in Go would ask about the following:
- Go packages and pointers
- Go string literals
- The syntax used for Go loops
- Go goroutines
- Go interfaces
- Type Assertion in Go
- Differences between GOPATH and GOROOT Go variables
Benefits of Go
Using Go comes with many benefits, and they all simplify the developer's work while also contributing to the fast and effective workflow in the long run.
As I already mentioned, Go is very fast, performant, and versatile, and it’s easily compiled to any hardware and all platforms. It can be a script language replacement and is highly conductive and fast.
Also, it is effortless to learn and implement in work (fit for newer and senior developers). In other words, upon the initial usage learning, the developer can start building things in just a few weeks of working with Go.
When asked about why he likes working in Go, Maia listed the following benefits:
- Strong standard library
- Simplicity
- Good performance
- Easy to deploy
- Working with Terraform and Docker
However, the broad developer community also highlights the scalability, easy readability of code (like with Python and PEARL), and the numerous architecture benefits overall.
According to a Stack Overflow survey, Go is among the higher-ranked languages regarding how developers like it.
Talented Golang developers available now
Furkan C.
Experienced Go Developer
- MongoDB
- JavaScript
- •••
In early 2018, Furkan fell in love with Golang and abandoned PHP. Since then, he has delivered beautiful endpoints to front-end applications. His previous jobs had a stri...
31.90 € hourly
Alexandr S.
Golang Developer
- Laravel
- TypeScript
- •••
Web developer with more than 5 years of experience in the development of various projects.
31.90 € hourly
Jakub B.
Go Expert
- Entity Framework
- C
- •••
Software Developer raised in the DevOps culture, who cares about business value, quality, ops, and getting things done. Usually, Proxify doesn't onboard devs with less th...
31.90 € hourly
Why use Go?
Go is a compiled, concurrent, garbage-collected, statically typed language. It was developed and open-sourced in 2007 by Google. The Golang’s selling point is in the solid balance between speed, ease, and safety. Its biggest advantage over other languages is support for concurrency.