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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

I think most of these need to be up-leveled to being open ended like “tell me about your development process” or “describe my role in the organization”. Even then differing questions will be asked to various interviewers either with you guiding the conversation or asking in Q&A at the end. I mean, is your entire decision going to be made on GIT being used?

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> I mean, is your entire decision going to be made on GIT being used?

The absence of Git is certainly a critical negative factor. I wouldn't work in a company without source control, and these days Git and source control are more or less the same (I guess it's possible they use Mercurial).

SVN is also still in use.

yuck

Strong agree. It reminds me a bit of the format of interview that unskilled or inexperienced hiring managers come up with:

  - "How big was your team at your last company?"
  - "What languages do you use at your last company?"
  - "Do you prefer to use for..in loops or [].for() notation?"

And using the surface answer as the way to make a decision. Being able to navigate a topic from broad-to-specific is a specific skill that is rarely taught and are very lucky if they manage to stumble on to it after enough experience and self-reflection.

> I mean, is your entire decision going to be made on GIT being used?

Absolutely. If a company doesn't use any modern versioning system that's probably one of the biggest red flags there are.

> I mean, is your entire decision going to be made on GIT being used?

I think it's up to every candidate to decide what's important to them. There are so many jobs, candidates can be choosy, so they might as well find a company that fits them. For the candidate that loves Git and absolutely requires it to be used for them to be fulfilled, it's a good question to ask. It's hardly going to be difficult for a candidate to find a company which answers yes to that particular question, so might as well ask and then skip a company that says no.

I think the problem with open-ended questions is that it gives the person asked the opportunity to focus exclusively on the positive. With a question like "tell me about your development process", it's broad enough that it would be easy to miss what they aren't focusing on.

I agree a lot of these are extremely specific, but I think there's probably a middle ground where questions can be probing without being extremely specific.

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