it's incredibly sad but it's real -- so many senior candidates have problems with commit messages, opening PRs.

not even joking: i've seen people with like 10y of experience trying to push to main :(

Dave Farley (of the 2010 "Continuous Delivery" book fame) explicitly recommends committing and pushing directly to main (or master), and he actively argues against using feature branches and blocking pull requests.

https://www.davefarley.net/?p=247

What's incredible is how set some people are in their ways that they can't conceive of alternatives.

At one job I had, we used git extensively, but not GitHub. We had internal systems for review and branch management. I could tell you all the gory details about various workflows and landmines in git. Is the test here really about git, or git+GitHub?

PRs are not only not a basic feature of git - it's not a git feature at all. Though button clicking on GitHub is anyway a crazy thing to test

[delayed]

Do you mean specifically Github, or any code forge at all? When you say "we rarely use different branches", what do you mean - you're all pushing to master, or you have branches for each team or something? I would regard "code forge" and "separate branch per reviewable unit of work" as extremely normal, nearly universal.

[delayed]

I rarely use anything beyond checkout, clone, pull, commit, cherry-pick, revert, and push in a job. If I have to, I'm probably asking the AI what to do by giving it my situation. And hopefully the AI can read about whatever git standards the company would like to be enforced so the engineer doesn't have to interrupt someone for that.

This is more about opportunity cost because instead of asking about git, you could ask about other valuable skills in your limited time with the interviewee, but I guess if git is really that important, then it's justified.