Sure, but it also means being skilled in writing Node backends and I'm doubtful if knowing what some meta tags mean is a good indicator for that.

This is the equivalent of interviewing for a C developer by letting him explain a Makefile.

Surely you don't think this would be the _only_ tech-oriented conversation starter / interview question in a full-stack interview. This is for testing the front-end "half" of a full-stack dev's skills. A separate conversation in the same interview would be had for node, SQL, etc.

what's wrong with that? surely a c developer would know their tools. I wouldn't call it a stretch to ask if a java developer could explain maven

Pretty much the same thing that would be wrong with asking a javascript dev to explain grunt.

What if that C++ dev primarily uses visual C++ and Visual studios projects? What if the C++ dev primarily used Cmake, ninja, or scion (or any of the other thousands of C++ build tools).

What if that C++ dev never really needed to start a project from scratch?

The issue is testing someone on minutia doesn't tell you anything about how capable they are. In particular, testing them on minutia that they very likely rarely interact with is beyond pointless.

> What if that C++ dev primarily uses visual C++ and Visual studios projects? What if the C++ dev primarily used Cmake, ninja, or scion (or any of the other thousands of C++ build tools).

Then it's an opportunity for the candidate to explain the tools they do use.

There are certainly bad interviewers out there who misuse these kinds of questions, but I think they're fine if used as conversation starters.

if it makes any difference, I was referring to C, for which Make is the majority, I think - could be wrong, though, since I'm not a c developer.

But to the point, I'm not sure if the code at issue would be considered minutiae or not, but I believe that the more curious you are, the more you tend to dig into the details, and a person doing this over many years would attain a rich knowledge-base spanning depth and breadth. I know as a java developer that I've referred innumerable times the docs for the POM and settings structure in order to explore the limits of customizing my build, which would include the rather obscure features. Not saying this is technically comparable to meta tags in html, but maybe that's what the author was going for.

It's not that they can't technically answer it.

It's that the signal you're gonna get out of such an interview is gonna be so low that whoever you end up hiring is mostly going to be due to chance + how much you "liked" them.