I happen agree with those two specific examples for specific reasons. I’m less sure about the suggestion that a niche tool needs to be justified. Why does there need to be a good reason? I’ve had jobs with in-house source control tools, and there were perfectly fine reasons for them at the time, and the companies were IMO making better trade offs than people choosing the thing everyone else was using.
When Joel wrote the Joel Test, git use was nowhere near as widespread as it is today. Doesn’t it predate GitHub? I mostly feel like the likelihood of this particular question being helpful in an interview is near zero, since nearly everyone’s on git for code anyway (or Perforce if there’s binary content.) I see comments here from people experiencing odd setups, but I’m pretty sure that is not the norm today.
When Joel wrote the Joel Test, git use was nowhere near as widespread as it is today. Doesn’t it predate GitHub? I mostly feel like the likelihood of this particular question being helpful in an interview is near zero, since nearly everyone’s on git for code anyway (or Perforce if there’s binary content.) I see comments here from people experiencing odd setups, but I’m pretty sure that is not the norm today.