How To Ace Your Full Stack Developer Interview
Full-stack developers are the gold standard tech hire in our digitally transforming world. They are in short supply and in incredibly high demand, but they still need to be able to enter any interview and deliver a balanced, fair and confident report of themselves.
Full-stack development professionals are a heady mix of multi-faceted tech pros and astute coders, who can project manage with speed and dexterity, consistently deliver high-quality work, and adapt with vigor when needed.
As Bootcamp put it, they are “the Swiss army knives of the development world…capable of transitioning seamlessly from one development environment to the next”.
Full-stack developers are more curious than engineers, more fastidious than programmers, and more naturally agile than project managers. They are, in fact, sort of all three - they can make, design, code, troubleshoot, and launch a product, app, or website, from scratch.
There also aren't enough of them to go around.
“92% of organizations increase their cloud workloads, the IT talent shortage keeps increasing”.
“The demand for engineers with the right skill set continues to skyrocket and is expected to grow 22 per cent from 2019 to 2029”,
“545K software developers will have left the market by (2026)”,
“Over 50% of businesses (hire) tech employees despite (a) mismatch between requirements and actual skills”.
So with a national shortage of developers, it stands that full stack developers with a good resume should be able to walk into any job, right?
Actually, no. These types of skilled developers still need to get the basics right - after all, if FSDs are taking home 6 figure salaries, the work has to match the take-home pay, and that sort of quality workmanship takes balance: between raw skill and maturity, between time management and speedy service, between consolidation and the relentless pursuit of perfection.
There are still some basics full stack developers need to get right to guarantee interview success.
Strategizing your Full Stack Developer interview should follow a plan - focus on building up your skills in the context of the job and the requirements of the role, and remember that your skills need to extend beyond the screen: you are still expected to talk about more than coding, and you still need to be a fully-fledged creative on board any team.
Anecdotes, Examples and displaying your Portfolio
To show your full range of abilities you need to be able to illuminate any interview with a range of examples and working anecdotes that display your unique full stack skills.
You also need to be able to cater to requirements - that means taking stock of the needs of the job description (such as experience with specific coding languages, or knowledge of tools) and making sure you hone in on these skills or types of experience when answering questions.
To this end, an engaging, creative portfolio can work as the basis for your skillset presentation - you can use certain projects to better highlight project deliverables and skills utilized while highlighting each stage of production up to and including final delivery.
“What are you working on now”?
This is the sort of question where you can flex your full stack muscles: you can talk about your passion projects, interests and desires (even the ones outside of coding) and contextualize your skill set through a wider self-biographical character study if you will.
We urge you to push your personality as far as you can into this answer, as there is, truly, no “wrong” answer to this question other than not having an answer. Make it personal, make it funny, make it creative, make it (ideally) related to development. But make sure you provide it!
Know your Code
You will be asked questions about your coding knowledge, and you have to be prepared to answer with elan, specificity, and passion.
Typical questions, such as “what is your favorite language and why?”, are the perfect opportunities to talk about your passions for code (and your preferred language, of course), and your favored models of working, especially when you factor in examples of programme, app or website building you, or your teams, have completed.
You can also use these types of open-ended questions to talk about new technologies or languages you are learning, or want to learn, that you may feel add to your stack wheelhouse. Showing that you value L&D and consistent approaches to learning are a vital part of being a full stack developer - it shows you always want to progress and get better at your job.
How do you manage your teams?
This is a multifaceted (and tricky) question, as it incorporates both a desire to know how you holistically manage your department/relationships with coding teams and/or other stakeholders and your ability to handle poor code or missed deadlines.
Although not a trick question per se, you need to make sure you answer with sagacity: you need to make sure you display marks of a good leader, such as telling examples of empathy, collaboration, successful pair-programming, or testing, while showing a clear line of quality assurance expectation in yourself, and in those you work with.
The key to successfully nailing your full stack developer interview is less about the raw skills, and more about how you relate, and contextualize, your skills in relation to the job at hand.
If you can meet that balance, deliver on that need, and prove you’re the right person for the role, the door will open for you.
