A hiring manager's question bank for PHP and Laravel developers — Eloquent and N+1 queries, queues, middleware, the service container, testing, and security. Built to separate people who can scaffold a CRUD app from people who keep a Laravel codebase fast and clean as it grows.
Laravel makes it easy to build something that works, which is exactly why interviewing for it well takes care. Almost any candidate can generate a controller and a model; the developers worth hiring are the ones who understand what the framework does for them and where its conveniences turn into traps. The classic example is the N+1 query: a candidate who loops over a collection and lazily loads a relationship inside the loop has written code that passes every test and then melts the database in production. So the most valuable signal is whether someone reasons about the queries Eloquent generates, knows when to eager load, and can tell the difference between elegant code and efficient code. Beyond the ORM, you want to confirm they understand the pieces that make a Laravel app maintainable: how the service container resolves dependencies, how middleware shapes the request lifecycle, when to move slow work into a queued job, and how to actually test the result. Security matters too — mass assignment, validation, authorization gates, and not trusting user input are where careless Laravel code leaks. The questions below run from Eloquent and the query layer through the framework internals into queues, testing, and security, roughly in order of how depth reveals itself. Listen for candidates who talk about what query a piece of code runs, who reach for jobs and events to keep controllers thin, and who can explain a tradeoff rather than just naming a feature.
Choose six to eight questions across two or three categories instead of the whole list. Begin with an Eloquent & Database question — the N+1 discussion alone tells you a lot — then move into Framework Internals and close on a Queues, Testing, or Security topic. Follow every clean answer with "what query does that run?" or "how would you test it?" to see real depth.
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