It’s not a bad or unreasonable question, but it is completely ignorant and pollyannish. These are the same HR professionals that let managers submit high or acceptable marks for all employees every year and then wonder why a large number of teams underperform. Inside large orgs you will regularly encounter people that have insanely high titles and their only appreciable skill is being able to survive inside the bureaucracy like a cockroach after successive nuclear blasts. You will encounter senior and staff enterprise software engineers that have never written a line of code and have zero commits ever.