[yumraj]

I love that question, and may use it, or a variant, in one of my future interviews.

My reasoning: I would like my team members to be able to contribute in all aspects of product development. This includes not only engineering decisions but also work with the product managers in identifying both potential new features as well as short comings or issues with some requirements. It also tells me how narrow or broad a particular person's knowledge base is.

Let me try to put it in other words: it may tell me if a particular frontend engineer would be open to exploring backend development? What if the language stack changes, will they be open to exploring new languages, stacks, frameworks, OS, platforms. Or, will they be limited to what they know. Will they be able to just code what they're told, or will they be able to form and express their opinion about yet unknown things.