Back-End Developer Interview Questions

This page has been translated to Chinese by monklof.

I started writing down this list as a personal reminder of topics I had the chance to discuss with colleagues and friends, and that I wanted to deepen...

I'm not a big fan of asking technical questions in job interviews: I rather prefer to sit together with candidates in front of some real code, hands on the keyboard, facing a real problem, and have a full day of pair programming, hopefully rotating with all the other team members. Yet, I feel some technical questions could be a good starting point to begin an engaging and nice conversation, and this can be useful to get a deeper knowledge of each others.

This repo collects a number of back end related questions that can be used when vetting potential candidates. It is by no means recommended to use every single question on the same candidate: that would take hours, and would have no sense at all, as they cover a too broad set of topics for a single developer's to possibly know. Browse the section you find more relevant for your context, and pick the questions that give you more ideas on the conversation to have.

Notice

Most of the questions are open-ended, and some of them just don't have a right or a wrong answer. On the contrary, they are intended to be used as the starting point for a conversation that hopefully tells you more about the person's capabilities than a straight answer would. Personally, I would even choose the questions whose answers are not yet clear to me.

Again, I stress that just asking questions is hardly sufficient. Complete the interview with a long pair programming session with your candidates: it is one of the best opportunities to know each others' style and approach and to let candidates know some details about their future day job.

This project is admittedly inspired by Front-end Job Interview Questions by @darcyclarke

Where are the answers?

Sooner or later I will complete it with the relative answers. Feel free to contribute, it would be highly appreciated!

Table of Contents

1. Questions about Design Patterns
2. Questions about Code Design
3. Questions about languages
4. Web Questions
5. Databases Questions
6. NoSQL Questions
7. Code Versioning Questions
8. Concurrency Questions
9. Questions about Distributed Systems
10. Questions about Software Lifecycle and Team Management
11. Questions about logic and algorithms
12. Questions about Software Architecture
13. Questions about Service Oriented Architecture and Microservices
14. Questions about Security
15. General Questions
16. Open Questions
17. Questions based on snippets of code
18. Bill Gates Style Questions