Best Interview Questions for a Full Stack Developer

Full Stack Developer Interview Questions

A Full Stack Developer is a vital role. They provide coding support to both the user-facing side and non-user facing side of a software or site to help ensure that your product looks and functions exactly the way you want. Due to their extensive knowledge, they also help to streamline communication between designers and programmers. So, it’s important you’ve got the right Full Stack Developer interview questions on hand to make the right hiring choice for this crucial position!

When hiring and interviewing a Full Stack Developer these skills and qualifications are the ones you need to look out for:

Ability to code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript alongside one or more back-end programming languages (Python, Ruby or PHP)
Able to test and debug their own work.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Knowledge of design terms and ways of working.
Ability to maintain cross-platform compatibility with software or sites.
Desire to stay up-to-date with relevant industry trends and changes.
Proven experience with writing APIs.
Highly capable of working to strict deadlines.

Depending on the software and programmes your company uses, it is also worth checking they have experience with using these too.

Interviewing a Full Stack Developer

When choosing interview questions for a Full Stack Developer it’s best to choose a mix of technical, behavioural and skill-related ones. That way, you get the full scope of your candidate!

As a Full Stack Developer has such a massive impact on the rest of your design and development process, it’s vital that you get someone who is the right fit for your needs. These questions are designed to be used in the early stages of the interview process, this way you’ll get a good idea of whether the developer is a good fit for the role as quickly as possible.

How to open the Full Stack Developer job interview

Before jumping right into the interview, it’s important to remember that your candidate might be feeling some pre-interview nerves. To combat this and ensure you’re getting an honest overview of their skills, abilities and personality it’s a good idea to ask a few upbeat Full Stack interview questions to put them at ease.

This opening interview section doesn’t have to last too long but will make a huge difference to how the rest of your interview goes.

Job Description available

See our Full Stack Developer Job Description here

For the interview

A positive opener to start

What do you enjoy most about being a Full Stack Developer?

Which project that you’ve worked on are you most proud of and why?

Behavioral Questions

Which programming language do you enjoy working with the most and why?
This question will give you an insight into a developer’s strengths and personality, as well as an idea of their way of working. If your company exclusively use a certain language, it is worth following up and asking whether the candidate enjoys working with this language in your Full Stack Developer interview.
How do you ensure that you’re always up to date with the latest changes and trends in the development industry?
Here you will get another insight into the candidate’s personality type, alongside an idea of what information and initiative they can bring to your company.
What do you think makes a good Full Stack Developer?
The candidate should be able to name a few soft and hard skills that set them apart from other developers. You’ll also be able to gauge how well they understand the role and measure this against the needs of your company.
Describe a project you’re working on at the moment and the steps you’re taking to complete it.
This will give you a clearer understanding of the developer’s experience and way of working, which will allow you to envision how this will fit into your team.

Soft Skills

Describe a time where you’ve received code from a team member that was low quality or contained an error.
Developers may encounter this situation at some point. This answer will highlight the candidate’s people skills, communication and problem-solving ability.
When receiving multiple task requests from different teams, how do you prioritise them?
Due to the nature of the Full Stack Developer role, they will often have deadlines set by numerous teams at once. Their answer here will allow you to understand how they will deal with this and offer insight into their time-keeping and organisation skills.
How would you respond to a coding request from a team member that you didn’t believe was an improvement to our site?
This answer will give you an idea of how well the candidate communicates with other team members, along with their confidence in their role and ability to offer constructive feedback.
When given a task that has aspects you’re not confident in, what steps do you take to ensure it is completed to a high standard?
A great quality to have in a Full Stack Developer is the willingness to learn and ask questions, as well as realistically self-assess their own abilities. The answer here will give you a good idea of whether this is something the candidate will do.

Hard Skills

Name a few of the key points you’d focus on when optimising a website.
Here the developer will be able to name a few of the changes they’d make to optimise a website, as well as giving a good insight into the other areas of your company they’d have knowledge of (e.g. SEO.)
Which tools and software do you use daily?
This answer will give you an overview of the tasks the candidate is well versed in, and it will also allow you to assess how well they will integrate with your business and what they’ll need to train in. If there are certain tools that are essential within your company, include these in this part of the developer interview.
Which skills do you possess that you think makes you the perfect fit for this role?
While this question isn’t a specific interview question for a Full Stack Developer, it does give the candidate a chance to list some of the skills they possess that they can bring to your team.
When implementing a new page or feature, which tools and processes do you use to test your code’s functionality?
Here you’ll get a good idea of how well a Full Stack Developer works independently, as well as which tools and processes they could bring to your business.
What steps do you take when working with bugs in a particularly complex program?
This will be a key part of a developer’s role. Their answer here will give you insight into how well they’ll work with debugging errors in your product, as well as their ability to work under pressure.

Operational / Situational Questions

Describe a time when you’ve had to make a split-second decision in your career and how you managed this process.
When working with strict deadlines or unforeseen errors, developers may have to make spur of the moment decisions. This question will allow you to understand how comfortable and confident a candidate would be with doing that, as well as give you an idea of their work history.
How would you handle poor communication from a colleague or team when working together to a tight deadline?
A Full Stack Developer will have to work on projects with many stakeholders. So, it’s important that they are able to take charge or feel comfortable with communicating their needs from other teams or individuals.
Tell me about a time when you have worked to two different timelines on two different projects, and how you managed this?
This will be a situation that a developer is likely to be in, so it is good to get an idea of how they will handle this and what their experience of juggling projects has been up until now.
Describe your experience with continuous integration to me.
Continuous integration is especially important to Full Stack Developers, knowing that they have experience merging their code with other contributors is important to help with consistency in your business.