As a junior Solidity dev, how deep should I really go into gas optimization during interviews?
I’ve noticed that most junior Solidity interviews don’t dive too heavily into gas micro-optimizations unless it’s for a DeFi or L2 project where every extra transaction cost matters. What interviewers really want to see is whether you understand why gas costs occur — like how storage writes cost ~20k gas or why mappings are usually cheaper than arrays.
I once over-optimized to the point where my code became harder to read, and the reviewer said, “Gas is cheap; debugging isn’t.” Since then, I only optimize where it meaningfully affects user costs or state behavior. I want to understand what level of depth interviewers realistically expect from juniors.
