Low level implementation details are relevant questions for getting a freelance programming assignment of taking over an existing project, not a full-time contract and especially not one at a bigco. IMO asking such questions tells you are religious about petty stuff instead of looking at the bigger picture and focusing on the deliverables. Being curious about team structure, general project management and development practices is great, as it shows interest in your possible future working environment, but picking on tools and discriminating against minor tech solutions is a bit naive from my perspective.
This is an implied project management question. (1) Can the employer even speak to it? (2) Does the employer see those who specialize on these areas as less important than other areas, in that they are fine with having no opinion on the matter?
> legacy practices
Did you not see this?
I picked HTML and (presentational) CSS (classes) for a reason, as they are boilerplate and they indicate whether or not Separation of Concerns bubbles up to management. Questions about HTML minification, the whole point behind preprocessed languages, etc. can be teased out with just one question.
It's like breaking into a network, looking at the codebase, and then combing for organizational and sociological judgments based on what you see. (LESS/SASS will comparatively more likely be documented. That said, would you take on an employer that leaves undocumented what can most easily be documented? — so it's likely they have lots of throw-away, unreadable, undocumented CSS. Do you want to work for an employer that is okay with "throw-away, unreadable, undocumented"?)
HTML is the lingua franca of the Web. Would you honestly work for an employer that calls this "petty stuff"? Tell me that. It's a tech interview both ways.
What if the employer responds, "That's petty stuff. We hire you to make that decision. We don't care. See the forest"?
You can find any person on the street who might say this. So why are you dolled up in a suit and tie yet again to be told "What you care about is irrelevant"?
Or what if the employer says, "I don't really know, but I'm glad you think about very finely detailed problems..."?
Generally my belief is that interview questions should fish or have the structure of getting you hired on the spot (http://pbfcomics.com/81/), where in asking them you've maximally described yourself but minimally given the employer the opportunity to fail. (Again, you don't care about your lingua franca of the Web? Go hire someone who has no opinion on this like you do.)
> I picked HTML and (presentational) CSS (classes) for a reason, as they are boilerplate and they indicate whether or not Separation of Concerns bubbles up to management.
One positive thing that comes from your example is, if they know too much about that it means there is a whole lot of micro-management going on.
Okay, what's the point of "Can I see the codebase?" if not to come to assertions about the caliber and organization of the developers, and their capacities, backgrounds, etc.?
