The Ultimate, Non-Technical Guide to hiring Full-Stack Developer and How to Spot Fakes

If you’re into recruiting and you don’t want to embarrass yourself by recommending a fake developer to a client, here’s how you can easily spot fake ones.

Full-stack Definition:

• you know a little bit of backend, frontend, devops but you’re master of none.

Meaning that you’re no master doesn’t mean you don’t know the shit at all! There are fundamentals that one that calls himself or herself full-stack should know.

This guide is compacted to be asked in a 15 min phone interview

Without further ado, here are they

Start with

• What is your preferred language ?

Followed by

• Tell me the 3 worst defects of your preferred language

as it’s a hard to cheat question. one should be able to know the limits of his language. A “no defects” answer would be considered a bad one

General Knowledge Questions

Question to ask: What is a CNAME ?

Keywords for correct answer: alias, subdomain

Question: what is the difference between a PUT request and a POST request

Keywords for correct answer: post is for create operations, put is for update operations

Can you name few message queue systems ?

Keywords for correct answer: redis, rabbitmq, amazon sqs, beanstalkd

Have you heard about 12 factor apps and what are they ?

This page https://12factor.net/ is famous and everybody should know about it

Keywords: see the above page

What is the Singleton pattern ?

this is one of the most famous patterns

Keywords: one instance, “one object”, anti-pattern, hide the constructor

What is a unit test?

Keywords: single unit of functional

What means linting ?

Keywords: checking code for stylistic or suspicious constructs, static code analyzer

What does git reset do ?

(this one is a little bit harder, but bonus points if they know it)

keywords: reset current branch to point somewhere else, head, soft, mixed, merge, hard

Basic CSS knowledge

How would you put using CSS a login form in the center ?

Keywords: position absolute, top 50%, display flex

Name few CSS Frameworks

bootstrap, materialize css, bluma, tailwind, foundation

Basic Security related questions

What stored inside a JWT ?

This question is quite important because JWT are used almost everywhere there is an authentication in place

Keywords: header, payload, signature, user id, role

What is the difference between symmetric and asymmetric encryption ?

Keywords: shared key (for symmetric), public/private key (for asymmetric)