I get the theory, that good people ought to ask smart questions, but it feels trivially hackable the same way all those stupid brain teaser questions from '90s interview processes were. In other words, professional interviewees - the kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - will outperform people who are smart and skilled but don't approach things in exactly the way the scoring checklist expects.
(Bonus points if you penalise people for not asking about something which was easily discoverable from Glassdoor, industry contacts or even your own company website.)
If people who just memorize can outperform smart people, it just means that the one conducting the interview is not really smart, and so incapable of recognizing expertise.
No, it means that interviewing is a lousy way to select people and it's full of bias. We know this. We know that interviewing doesn't select the best candidate.
My comment was not saying the opposite.
> best candidate
I never was talking about best candidate.
I think this is no longer a good question. (The answer will almost certainly be the affirmative, and the person asking it might sound unaware.)
It is becoming a super niche market, once the dinosaurs die off, whoever can come in and work on it will make bank. In fact my company is getting pretty anxious about it, as the cost of even migrating from it is going to be high.
As a bit of evidence in support of Racket being a secret sauce for this, I'd point to how ITA Software (before they were aquired by Google) leveraged Lisp to integrate a new, modern node with the IBM legacy airline reservation system network. They publicly stated that a Lisp was what made this effort viable.
(But doing a Web site or app is so much easier and less risky. VCs are set up to give a site/app dotcom wads of money, and want to see you go through the funding rounds and acquisition/IP. And the technical problems are usually well-understood from the start, and it's just a matter of execution. And you can pick a site/app idea that doesn't involve having to do difficult enterprise sales courtships. Also, personally, given that I started working young, so some of the dates on my resume cause my job applications to be deleted instantly, I'm not anxious to be adding showstopper keywords like AS/400 to my resume.)
I would expect something like a Creative Commons license to make it clear what can be reused and under which conditions.
But yes, this should me more explicitly mentioned if they are advertising it as "open-source".
