Nov 9, 2025
40+ Best Questions To Ask a Developer in an Interview To Find the Right Fit
Discover essential questions to ask a developer in an interview to assess skills, experience, and problem-solving abilities effectively.
You need to hire a developer, and the resume looks solid, but the interview feels like a guessing game. This guide lays out practical interview frameworks, sample technical and behavioral prompts, coding tasks, debugging exercises, and code review cues, offering clear questions to ask a developer in an Interview to help you confidently identify and hire the right developer by asking insightful, well-structured interview questions that reveal fundamental skills, mindset, and fit.
To make that easier, Noxx's AI recruiter turns your hiring goals into targeted question sets, ranks candidate answers against role requirements, and highlights gaps in technical depth, cultural fit, and collaboration skills so that you can focus on the best hires.
Table of Content
Top 26 Questions to Ask a Developer in an Interview
1. Why Did You Decide to Become a Software Engineer?
This question exposes why the candidate chose this career. Listen for curiosity, problem-solving, and hands-on experience rather than a paycheck first.
A strong candidate will describe:
An early spark
Ongoing learning
Examples of owning technical work
Hiring managers like Boris Shiklo note that people who genuinely enjoy engineering tend to stay engaged and suggest improvements that non-engaged hires often miss.
Persistence Through Meaningful Work
Candidates who mention meaningful projects or impact, and who seek roles where they can keep improving, generally persist when work gets hard. Companies that offer challenging and meaningful projects often attract individuals who value these opportunities.
2. What Are You Looking for in This Job?
Ask whether the candidate researched your company and why this role matters to them.
Good answers:
Link values
Technical challenges
Career growth
If they only mention salary, that can indicate lower cultural fit. Candidates who align their goals with your product, team, or mission tend to stay longer and contribute more.
3. Why Should We Hire You?
This asks the candidate to map skills to your needs. Look for examples of measurable impact, teamwork, and where they solved similar problems.
Watch for a balance between personal achievements and team results. Candidates who explain how they would help the team and who reference concrete outcomes show practical readiness.
4. What Questions Do You Have for Us?
A candidate’s questions reveal priorities.
Expect questions about:
Team structure
Engineering practices
Release cadence
Mentoring
Roadmap items
Few or no questions can indicate low curiosity or limited research. Thoughtful questions signal someone who evaluates fit as closely as you do.
5. What Programming Languages Do You Prefer?
This allows candidates to explain their language experience and why they chose one for specific tasks.
Listen for tradeoffs:
Performance
Ecosystem
Libraries
Community
Maintainability
Preference tied to concrete results, shipping features, solving latency, or building libraries, shows practical judgment.
6. What’s Important When Checking a Team Member’s Code?
There is no single correct answer, but this reveals what they value:
Correctness
Readability
Tests
Security
Performance
Simplicity
Strong candidates discuss testing, clearly express their intent in commits and PRs, provide meaningful comments, and offer constructive feedback. Their approach predicts how they will raise the team’s code quality.
7. When Writing Your Own Database Server, What Should You Consider?
Between consistency and availability, this open-ended prompt tests:
Knowledge of storage
Indexing, durability
Concurrency
Sharding
Query planning
Tradeoffs
Candidates who mention threading, on-disk formats, replication, and performance measurement demonstrate an understanding of backend complexities. This question distinguishes between surface familiarity and deep system thinking.
8. How Do You Assure Software Quality?
Ask about:
Unit testing
Integration tests
Test data
Code coverage
Static analysis
CI pipelines
Incident postmortems
Good answers demonstrate:
A process for catching bugs early
Automated regression checks
Methods for verifying behavior in production
Look for measurable practices rather than vague claims.
9. What Project Management Tools Have You Used?
Answers indicate whether they’ve experience working in Scrum, Kanban, or more ad hoc workflows, as well as the tools they use, such as:
Jira
Asana
Trello
Linear
GitHub Issues
Tool fluency reveals how they track work, estimate, and collaborate with product and QA.
10. How Did You Solve a Problem You Faced?
This behavioral prompt illustrates:
Problem framing
Diagnostic steps
The chosen solution
The outcome
Look for:
Hypotheses
Data collection
Experiments
How they involved others
A straightforward narrative that includes tradeoffs signals mature problem-solving.
11. Tell Me About a Tough Development Problem You’ve Had in the Past and How You Solved It
How they reproduced the bug, the tools used to diagnose, root cause, and fix the bug in production. Candidates who describe rollback strategies, monitoring, and lessons learned show operational thinking.
12. Describe a Time When You Experienced a Significant Project Change at the Last Minute. How Did You Handle It and Complete the Project on Time?
Listen for triage steps, such as re-scoping, reprioritizing work, communicating with stakeholders, and preserving quality. Candidates who negotiate requirements and propose incremental deliveries usually manage change effectively.
13. Can You Briefly Tell Me About Some Projects You Worked on Recently and the Approach You Took From Start to Finish?
This asks for:
Scope
Design choices
Milestones
Outcomes
Focus on:
Architecture decisions
Trade-offs
Testing strategies
Deployment flows
Candidates who show clear milestones and iteration cycles reveal practical project management.
14. How Do You Come Up With Estimates?
Good estimators break work into small tasks, surface assumptions and unknowns, add buffers for risk, and track past accuracy to inform future estimates. Look for the use of story points, timeboxing, and how they update estimates when new information becomes available.
15. How Do You Prioritize Your Tasks as a Developer?
Strong answers show an ability to:
Weigh business value
Customer impact
Technical debt
Deadlines
Candidates who sync priorities with product owners and who block time for deep work demonstrate discipline.
16. How Do You Keep Your Skills Sharp and Up to Date?
Expect a mix of hands-on work, including:
Side projects
Open-source contributions
Reading blogs
Following thought leaders
Attending meetups
Taking courses
Candidates who can name recent learnings and how they applied them show active skill growth.
17. How Do You Keep Up With the Latest Advances and Programming Languages in This Field?
A sample answer might include:
Attending hackathons
Following tech leaders
Subscribing to newsletters
Contributing to open-source projects
Engaging in regular coding practice
Look for channels that produce knowledge rather than merely consume it.
18. What Are You Working On right now?
Current side projects or learning paths reveal interests and initiative. If the candidate is not employed, a personal project or learning plan shows ongoing momentum. Ask why they chose that project and what they are learning from it.
19. How Do You Come Up With Estimates?
If a candidate has given a prior answer, ask for a concrete, recent example where they estimated a feature. This reveals their calibration and how they improved future estimates.
20. How Do You Assure Software Quality?
Request specifics, such as:
Test frameworks
CI providers
Canary deploys
Incident response steps
Candidates who connect quality practice to measurable outcomes demonstrate ownership and accountability.
21. Do You Enjoy Working With a Team or Alone?
There is no single correct answer. Your team needs to match the candidate’s preference. Listen for flexibility. Able to work independently when required and to collaborate effectively in cross-functional teams.
22. Describe Your Ideal Environment as a Developer
Sample answer: I do my best work in a quiet environment. Despite this, I enjoy working in cross-functional teams that foster collaboration. I also prefer to work in an open layout environment that allows me to communicate with my team members face-to-face.
This helps me better understand any issues or concerns they have, should they arise. Although I prefer communicating in person, I'm also well-versed in various remote tools.
23. Describe a Conflict You Had With a Team Member and How You Resolved It
Sample answer: In my most recent role, another developer and I disagreed with a project's direction. To resolve the matter, we met and discussed our opinions, allowing each other to speak.
This allowed our conversation to flow more freely, and we were better able to understand where each other was coming from. Once we discussed our concerns, we reached a mutual agreement that benefited the project and our company.
24. How Would You Address a Project Delay or Error With Your Supervisor or Client?
Sample answer: You should provide regular updates on the project's progress. Project delays should never come as a complete surprise, as long as you’re communicating well with team members.
You should anticipate potential roadblocks ahead of time and notify your manager or client before they become an issue. Any problems should be communicated during the team’s daily stand-up. Communicate openly as frequently and as soon as possible.
Handling Blockers and Ensuring Project Progress
If you have a blocker or are waiting for a deliverable upstream, please notify the team. Let the hiring manager know that you have a history of promptly bringing issues to your manager’s attention and pushing for tasks to be completed.
You should also let them know that you will do everything in your power to ensure the project progresses. Show that you’re a results-oriented advocate.
25. Describe a Time When You Experienced a Significant Project Change at the Last Minute
Ask for the steps:
They took to re-scope
Communicate timelines
Protect quality
Candidates who propose incremental deliveries or rollback plans show pragmatic risk management.
26. Talk About Some Mistakes You Learned From
Everyone ships imperfect work. This question reveals whether a candidate acknowledges mistakes, learns from them, and changes processes to prevent recurrence. Strong answers name specific failures, root causes, and concrete steps taken afterward to improve testing, monitoring, or communication.
Related Reading
15 Common Questions About Experience and Background
1. What's Your Secret "Code Pet Peeve" That Doesn't Really Matter but Drives You Crazy?
This question assesses:
Coding style
Attention to detail
How a candidate ensures quality in a team setting
A revealing answer names a specific recurring issue, explains why it causes bugs or slows review cycles, and shows whether the person raises the problem constructively. Strong answers acknowledge the trade-off between perfect style and shipping value, and provide an example of how they nudged a team toward better habits.
2. What Was Something Really Hard for You to Get When You Were Learning It? What Helped It Click?
This reveals learning strategies and persistence.
Look for a description of a concrete topic, such as:
Concurrency
Asynchronous flows
System design
Type systems
Along with the steps the candidate took to master it, including:
Reading
Pair programming
Building a small project
Mentoring
A helpful answer ties the breakthrough to improved work outcomes, such as fewer race conditions or faster debugging.
3. What's Something That You Did Outside Your Comfort Zone That You're Glad You Did?
This shows a growth mindset and risk tolerance.
Good responses describe a real project or role change, including the uncomfortable parts, and provide measurable results, such as:
Shipped features
Reduced latency
Improved UX
Note whether they:
Sought help
Learned new tools
Changed processes to succeed
4. What's Your Favorite Dev Tool?
This highlights daily habits and tool fluency.
Candidates should name:
Tool
Editor
Debugger
Profiler
CI server
Observability platform
They can explain how it integrates into their workflow and accelerates feedback cycles. Top answers reference integrations, automation, or custom scripts that reduced toil and improved code quality.
5. What Are You Learning Right Now?
This measures continuous learning and alignment with the role.
Look for concrete topics such as:
A new language
A framework
Cloud services
Architecture patterns
Testing approaches
As well as how they are applied in practice, including:
Side projects
Open-source projects
Coursework
Strong answers connect the topic to current industry trends or to gaps in their skill set that they want to close.
6. What Do You Wish More People Would Ask or Talk to You About?
This reveals overlooked strengths and areas of pride, such as:
System reliability
Mentoring, developer experience
Technical leadership
Candidates who answer clearly reveal soft skills and the types of impact they enjoy making beyond coding, such as shaping requirements or improving onboarding.
7. What Was Your Most Recent Development "Panic Moment, and How Did You End Up Handling It?
This probes incident response, stress management, and communication.
A strong story identifies the trigger, such as:
A failed deployment
Broken migration
Walks through immediate:
Triage
Stakeholder updates
Mitigation steps
Post-mortem with actionable items
Listen for the use of runbooks and monitoring, and how they avoided blame to focus on fixes.
8. What Is Something You Still Have Trouble Understanding Despite Researching the Subject?
This shows intellectual honesty and realistic limits.
A good reply selects a narrow, advanced topic, such as:
Formal verification
Advanced type theory
Distributed consensus
Explains the current obstacles and learning strategies underway
The answer signals humility and a plan for incremental learning rather than evasive or defensive responses.
9. What Do You Do to Get "Unstuck" on a Really Difficult Problem, Design, or Bug?
This reveals problem-solving and collaboration habits. Expect a mix of techniques:
Writing a failing test
Reducing scope
Binary searching the code path
Adding logs or traces
Rubber ducking
Pairing with a teammate
Strong responses show escalation choices and when they hit the brakes to prevent wasted effort.
10. How Have You Previously Detected Errors That Weren't Obvious?
This covers debugging tools and observability skills.
Look for techniques like:
Structured logging
Distributed tracing
Profiling
Static analysis tools
Fuzz testing
Contract tests
Plus a story where one of those methods found a subtle bug. The best answers connect detection to preventing regressions through:
CI
Monitoring alerts
Synthetic tests
11. Do You Have Experience Working in a Multidisciplinary Team?
These tests:
Communication
Empathy
Process skills
Candidates should describe working with:
Product managers
Designers
QA
Operations
Data teams
How they handled conflicting priorities
The artifacts they used, like:
User stories
Prototypes
Experiments
Strong examples show shared decision-making and measurable improvements in delivery or user metrics.
12. What Qualities Make You a Great Developer?
This invites evidence over buzzwords. Good answers list traits such as ownership, curiosity, clear communication, pragmatic testing, and shipping, and back each with a short anecdote or metric that demonstrates the trait in action, like reduced bug counts or faster cycle times.
Avoid vague claims without examples; the hiring manager wants concrete signals of competency and career progression.
13. What Programming Languages and Frameworks Are You Familiar With?
This checks:
Breadth
Depth
Role fit
Candidates should:
List languages and frameworks
Along with their recency
Relevant project contexts
Strong responses indicate proficiency levels and trade-offs made when choosing a stack.
Which stacks did they build features in
Which ones do they maintain
Where they contributed to core components or libraries
14. What Tools Do You Use to Keep Track of Project Requirements?
This checks process discipline and traceability.
Expect answers that name:
Issue trackers
Documentation tools
Practices, such as:
Jira
Asana
Trello
Notion
Confluence
Lightweight specifications
Acceptance tests
Requirement checklists tied to commits
Top candidates explain how they translate requirements into testable user stories and maintain a clear scope for stakeholders.
15. Describe a Time When You Experienced a Significant Project Change at the Last Minute. How Did You Handle It and Complete the Project on Time?
This evaluates:
Flexibility
Prioritization
Delivery under pressure
Listen for a clear description of the change, the decision process for:
Trading off scope versus quality
How they reallocated work
How they communicated dependencies
What they shipped as a minimum viable outcome
Look for post-delivery actions, such as fixes, refactors, or a retrospective, that reduce future disruption.
Related Reading
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It collects:
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Shortlists include:
Skills summary
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It allows your hiring manager to focus on speaking with the best fits first.
How Noxx Feeds Interview-Ready Artifacts Into Your Process
Each shortlist comes with suggested role-specific questions, test results, and a hiring scorecard you can use for structured interviews. That saves calendar time and helps you run consistent technical interviews across candidates.
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