Funny thing, nowadays it's going to be deprecated in favor of:
git switch -c newbranchI actually popped on the git development irc channel a few months ago to make this suggestion. The two people I talked to (at least one of whom seemed to be a core developer, although I did not verify this) did not see how, if you're going to conflate the actions of creating a branch and checking it out, it makes more sense to do this as a flag on the primary action, branch creation.
They were nice enough to have an in-depth conversion with a complete newcomer, though, so it was not a negative experience overall. Maybe someone else could convince them :)
That said, I do vaguely recall this seeming weird at first.
Why so? We don't go into great depth, but every hiring committee I've been on I make sure that we ask something about source control.
You can learn a lot about a developer's process by finding out if and how they use source control. (Red flag, for me, is if an apparent senior dev doesn't use a VCS.)