Because too many bad interviews are all about ensuring that the candidate knows the exact same 1% of CS/SWE knowledge as the interviewer.
Don't worry, karma dictates when the interviewer goes looking they'll get rejected for not knowing some similarly esoteric graph theory equation or the internal workings of a NIC card.
Too much of our interviewing is reading the interviewer's mind or already knowing the answer to a trick question.
The field is way too vast for anyone to even know a majority, and realistically it's extremely difficult to assess if someone is an expert in a different 1%.
Sometimes I feel like we need a system for just paying folks to see if they can do the job. Or an actually trusted credentialing system where folks can show what they've earned with badges and such.
A better interview question about this subject doesn't assume they have it memorized, but if they can find the answer in a short time with the internet or get paralyzed and give up. It's a very important skill to be able to recognize you are missing information and researching it on the Internet.
For example, one of my most talented engineers didn't really know that much about CS/SWE. However, he had some very talented buddies on a big discord server who could help him figure out anything. I kid you not, this kid with no degree and no experience other than making a small hobby video game would regularly tackle the most challenging projects we had. He'd just ask his buddies when he got stuck and they'd point him to the right blog posts and books. It was like he had a real life TRRPG Contacts stat. He was that hungry and smart enough to listen to his buddies, and then actually clever enough to learn on the job to figure it out. He got done more in a week than the next three engineers of his cohort combined (and this was before LLMs).
So maybe what we should test isn't data stored in the brain but ability to solve a problem given internet access.
Because the same kind of guys have one global ssh key they use for all server & all environments... they don't realise they can (and should) have multiple keys on one machine / one user. Different keys for different purposes.
Same issues with git: they don't realise they can have multiple configs, multiple remotes, etc. Never mind knowing how to sign commits.........
They claim to be linux boffins but cannot initialise a git repo. This has nothing to do with elitism. This is basic stuff.
What's next, they don't know what a bootloader or a partition is? Or run database engine with default settings? Or install a server OS and never bother to look at firewall config?
In a sense it's anything but obscure, that is, it's one of the most basic of features of the tool and the first thing (well, git init anyway) anyone ever uses.
But that's why people don't know about it, because they skip past the basics because in practice you never use it or need to know about it.
This is the reality of software engineering and the like though - mostly you learn what you need to know, because learning everything is usually wasteful and never used, and there's a lot available.
(I haven't been able to read documentation or a software book end to end in 20 years)
