How To Attempt Full Stack Developer Interview Questions: Power Guide For 2023 Candidates

Just as the Great Resignation ceased to be the favorite LinkedIn buzzword, layoff lingos are taking the internet by storm. With the IT sector witnessing the wrath of the recession, every IT company, be it MAANG or smaller development agencies, is either furloughing or laying off employees. Corporate spending is shrinking, hirings are either frozen or lowered to all-time lows, and packages are slashed off. Consequently, the job market has turned extensively competitive for any software profile, including full stack developer.

Being a reputed job portal, Talent 500 is committed to creating a 2023-focused interview questions series to help you secure the right job amid the chaos. In this article, we will walk you through the ins and outs of clearing a full-stack developer interview and getting the best offer out there.

Let’s begin!

Getting Started With Technical Fundamentals

As an interviewee, you should follow the standard engineering approach to problem-solving: understand, evaluate, devise the solution and present the solution. However, it is easier said than done since DevOps engineers can face a wide range of questions depending on the company, its technology stack, and the job role. 

Begin with identifying the tech stack of the organization using its public Git repositories or StackShare. Generally, organizations mention their technologies in the job description or on their website, but if that isn’t the case, you may use technology look-up tools like BuiltWith, SimilarTech, Wappalyzer, ‎Hunter TechLookup, or Netcraft.

Once you know the stack used by the company, brush off the basics with online resources like LeetCode’s top Interview Questions, HackerRank’s Interview Prep Kit, or Devpost’s YouTube videos (1,2,3). Also, summarize your working experience, past and current projects, your understanding of your preferred coding technologies, and your working style from a technical point of view. It is recommended to gain a working knowledge of technologies and frameworks other than your preferred ones. You might also want to be comfortable with using Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in its basic form to excel at live assignments.

In the below sections, we will give you a headstart on how to approach different interview rounds:

Trivia Quiz

Trivia quizzes are widely utilized by companies to ensure that you have a plausible understanding of what you have mentioned in your resume.

For example, you be asked:

• What is Callback in JS?
• What Is Long Polling?
• What is Promise and explain its states?
• Explain dependency injections
• What is the difference between GET and POST?
• Differentiate between Rolling Deployment Vs. Blue-Green Deployment
• What Is CORS?
• What is the difference between normalization and denormalization?

Here’s a list of common full-stack development questions. You can also refer to these full-stack development questions for added confidence. 

As a rule of thumb, you should be able to answer progressively narrowed-down questions asked in the below fashion:

• What is the importance of feature X in Y coding language?
• Is property A important for feature X?
• Which aspects of the product specification are correlated to property A?

Even if you don’t have the correct answer, try to approach the question logically since all programming languages share similar logic and constructs. It is your ability to reason and define your approach in real-time that is tested in order to understand if you are only good at soft skills that help with the interview and not the actual work. In 2023, trivia quizzes might become more focused on the issues faced currently by the employer as opposed to serving merely analytical purposes. Hence, you must display inquisitiveness and willingness to learn about a particular topic to increase your odds of getting hired.

Pair Programming / Live Coding

Be it an online interview or an in-person setting, and it is necessary that you are able to articulate your coding skills for pair programming. You may be required to either identify and fix a bug in an existing code or develop a fresh code for a given set of product specifications. Again, pair programming isn’t intended to analyze your coding prowess, but it rather focuses on your ability to work as a team member, problem-solving aptitude, and ability to implement solutions.

It is always good to communicate with your interviewer in case you need additional details since the requirement scheme is stripped down to a bare minimum. We recommend honing your skills on Coding Dojo Katas / TDD Community of Practice without features like autocomplete, key binding, or custom dotfile aliases since you may not have your ideal environment to stand out in a live coding interview.

In case the interviewer doesn’t participate in a pair format, we can assume this interviewing method is live coding. Every tip mentioned above remains pretty much the same, just that you may need to communicate your thought process during the subsequent discussions as opposed to conveying them in real-time.

Take Home Assignment

A take-home assignment is a rather convenient interviewing method as it allows you to work in a familiar environment. While you have a predefined timeline to submit the assignment, the access to online learning resources, Stack Overflow/Blackbox, makes it much more approachable. However, it is noteworthy that despite the simplistic nature and availability of resources, the tasks are designed to appear easier in nature than they are in reality.

Also, beware of questions appearing to be too generic and easygoing since they may have twists intended to be overlooked. Make sure you understand the assignment completely, document your coding work, and that you are able to walk the interviewer through the process thoroughly. Your implementation should be flawless, and make sure to include all assumptions made, possible solutions explored, and any alternate solution that you could have tried in case you had additional insights/resources/time.

Design / Build Challenges

Build challenges are allocated with boundary conditions and prompts which may be altered as the interview progresses. Here, the main goal is to gauge your ability to respond to changes in specifications, your willingness to entertain feedback, and see whether you have a constructive approach to adverse situations. Also, the interviewers may come up with alternate solutions which they would claim to be better than yours. 

Again, it is oriented more towards your approach to work in general than your skill set. As a rule of thumb, the design challenge will be followed by open-ended questions meant to determine your grip over full-stack development instead of a particular coding language/framework.

The questions may include the reasoning for choosing a particular pattern among the three types of design patterns: creational, structural, and behavioral. 

Which tradeoff would you prefer in a given situation and why?

How do UI, frontend, and backend interact in a particular scenario?

Thus, it is necessary to have a high-level understanding of full stack development even if you aren’t an expert in everything- which is never going to be the case/expectation.

Wrapping Up

Despite the negativity online, it is noteworthy that regardless of recessions, businesses don’t completely cease, and nor does hiring. We also recommend going through this article to understand the dos and don’ts for a better interviewing experience. It can be tough to get hired during an economic slowdown, but one must understand that competence is valued higher than experience during these periods.

Also, inflation coupled with insufficient personal finance planning makes things worse for candidates, resulting in an overcompensating, overactive job market. 2023 full-stack interviews will focus on finding candidates that are confident of arriving at solutions, and you must prepare to be a safer bet among a vast talent pool. If you are looking for a full-stack developer opportunity, sign up with Talent500 now. We have a vast portfolio of clientele offering remote full-stack developer jobs! See you there!