Complete hiring guide for Go (Golang) developers

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).”

Diego Maia

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:

1. Self-assessment tasks for shortlisted candidates
2. A scheduled call with the candidate to check the non-technical and soft skills along with professional skills
3. A more concisely formulated assessment for the technical knowledge checking
4. 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.

Go (Golang) interview questions and answers

1. Briefly explain about the Go packages.

Expected answer: The packages in Go represent directories where we store Go packages or source files, and they contain variables, functions, codes—they contain it all. The package represents a container that has all the functions needed for performing a certain task.

2. Define the Go pointers.

Expected answer: The Go pointers are also known as special variables, and they are, simply put, variables holding other variables’ addresses. The Go pointers, or special variables, are responsible for storing the data for a certain address contained in the system.

3. What are Go string literals?

Expected answer: The string constant that is a result of character sequence concatenating is called a string literal. With Go, there are two types of these string literals: Raw, and Interpreted.

4. Describe the types of Go string literals.

Expected answer: The Raw string literals are characters or a character sequence, written in between backquotes, such as this. These Raw string literals are full of (UTF-8-encoded) uninterrupted character sequences, and the string could have a new line too.

The Interpreted string literals are characters or character sequences that are written in between double quotation marks, as "such". This type of a string literal does not contain a new line, or an unfinished double quote, but, it has all the rest of characters, except the two mentioned previously.

5. Explain the Go scope of variables.

Expected answer: The scope is an area within a program where we can find a variable, and access it. A variable can be a method, loop, class, or similar, and a scope of variables means that the variable can be found and accessed only in that area, or scope, and not further or beyond that area.

6. How would you define the Go goroutine?

Expected answer: Goroutine represents a function in Go, which can run parallel to other functions or goroutines. These goroutines are lightweight threads, in comparison to other threads of a standard type. And, goroutines are used for concurrency (multiple computations simultaneously).

7. Briefly explain the process of concatenating strings.

Expected answer: Concatenating strings is a process where two or more strings are added into a single string. The easiest way for this is by usage of + operator, or the concatenation operator (+).

8. Define the Go function closure.

Expected answer: The function value that references a variable or variables outside of its own area, or its own body, is called a function closure. The closures in Go will reference all the variables out of the scope at hand, and even outlive the scope. Simply put, the closure is the function that has access to scope variables, even if the scope is fully destroyed and erased.

9. Briefly describe the testing steps you would use with Go.

Expected answer: With Go, we can easily test packages in an automated way through custom suites for testing. First, I need to create a suit, or a file with the ending _test.go

This suit needs to contain the TestXxx function within. Now, instead of Xxx, next I will insert the feature name of the feature I intend to test.

After this, I take the whole file of the testing suite to place it in the right location, which is the exact same file I want to test. This test file runs if I type the command go test

10. For concurrent data accessing, what would you choose between Channels and Maps?

Expected answer: Between Channels and Maps, I would need to choose Channels because it is a more secure, safer option of the two.

Channels offers block and lock mechanism options, which in turn disable the goroutines from information leaking/sharing when we have more threads.

In comparison, Maps lack the above-mentioned lock/block features. If I need to protect information, while using Maps, I would need to use special or certain locking features to protect all information and data going through the goroutines.