Hire Go Developers

Go earns its place at the edges of a system where cost and predictability matter — ingestion services, webhooks and event consumers, CLI tooling, anything that has to handle a lot of concurrent connections on modest hardware. A single static binary in a small container is also a meaningfully simpler thing to deploy and to secure.

Go’s design trades expressiveness for the ability to read unfamiliar code quickly, which is exactly the trade you want on infrastructure that outlives the team that wrote it, and exactly the wrong trade on a codebase full of intricate domain rules.

The concurrency bugs this language actually produces

Goroutines are cheap to start and easy to abandon. The characteristic Go defect is not a race detected in testing; it is a goroutine that is still alive because nothing ever told it to stop, and its symptom is memory and file descriptors climbing over days.

Three rules prevent most of it. Every goroutine has an owner who knows how it ends. Every context with a timeout has its cancel function deferred immediately, because an undeferred cancel leaks the timer as well as the goroutine. And a send on a channel whose receiver has gone away blocks forever, so a worker writing results needs a select on the caller’s context, not just on the channel.

The race detector belongs in continuous integration rather than in someone’s occasional local run. It only reports races that actually occur during the run, which means it is worth pointing at the test suite that exercises concurrency rather than at a smoke test.

Errors are values, and that changes the code review

The verbose error handling is the language’s most criticised feature and its most useful one, on the condition that errors are wrapped with context as they travel — %w and the wrapping helpers exist so a caller can ask what kind of failure this was without matching on a message string.

What we look for in review is the opposite of clever: a sentinel error that callers compare against, a wrapped cause at each layer that adds information rather than restating it, and no error swallowed into a log line at a level that cannot act on it.

The container detail that catches everybody

A Go process does not automatically respect a container’s CPU limit. Left alone it sizes its scheduler to the number of cores the host has, so a service limited to a fraction of a CPU still starts dozens of scheduler threads and spends its quota on context switching. Setting the parallelism value from the cgroup limit — by hand or with a small library — is a routine fix with an outsized effect, and it is a good question for anyone claiming production Go experience.

Where Go is the wrong choice

Domain-heavy business applications with intricate rules and many entity types. The language deliberately lacks the abstractions that make that code compact, and the result is either repetitive or reaches for generics and reflection until it is neither fast nor readable.

Data science and machine learning, where the ecosystem is not a serious contest. Rich user interfaces of any kind. And teams that will only ever write one small service — the operational advantages of a static binary are real, but they do not repay learning a new language for a single endpoint.

There is also a data-access caveat. Go’s ORMs are less mature than those in older ecosystems, and the idiomatic answer is generated typed queries or plain SQL. That is a good default and a genuine cost if your team expects an ORM to hide the database.

What we interview for

Ask how a candidate stops a goroutine. That one question separates people who have run Go in production from people who have read about channels, because leaked goroutines and missing context cancellation are the failure mode that appears weeks after launch. Then ask what they chose not to abstract, since restraint is the skill this language actually rewards.

Two follow-ups. Memory is growing but the heap profile looks flat — what else do you look at. And: what changed for you in recent versions of the language. The loop-variable scoping fix removed one of the most common bugs in Go code, and an engineer who has been paying attention will mention it without prompting.

What we ask about operations

Small things reveal whether someone has run this in anger. Whether profiling endpoints are exposed and how they are protected. Whether the binary is built into a minimal image or a distribution image out of habit. Whether the service handles termination signals and drains in-flight requests, or is simply killed. None of it is difficult; all of it is missing from services written by people who have only ever run go run.