{"id":1155,"date":"2026-07-14T14:44:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T09:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastroundai.com\/blog\/?post_type=iq&p=1155"},"modified":"2026-07-19T10:54:07","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T05:24:07","slug":"git","status":"publish","type":"iq","link":"https:\/\/lastroundai.com\/interview-questions\/git","title":{"rendered":"Git Interview Questions (2026): 30 Most Commonly Asked, With Answers"},"content":{"rendered":"

A backend candidate at a Series B fintech got asked one question in March 2026 that ended the interview early: “You just ran git reset --hard HEAD~1<\/code> on main, and you’d already pushed that commit twenty minutes ago. Two teammates have pulled since then. What happens next?” He explained reset correctly. He had no idea what to do about the two teammates. That gap is what actually separates candidates who’ve used Git from candidates who’ve only used GitHub’s merge button.<\/p>\n

Here’s an opinion that might be wrong: most teams that mandate a strict rebase-only workflow are optimizing for a diagram that looks clean in a slide deck, not for what happens when six people ship to the same branch under a deadline. Rebase produces a tidier git log<\/code>. Merge produces an honest one. Both are defensible, and an interviewer who expects a strong opinion without also wanting the trade-off explained isn’t testing the right thing.<\/p>\n

This page covers the Git interview questions that show up across coding and DevOps loops in 2026: the object model under the porcelain commands, staging and commit hygiene, branching and merge mechanics, merge versus rebase, cherry-pick, the reset\/revert\/checkout\/restore family (the one that trips up the most candidates), stash, remotes, conflict resolution, workflows, reflog recovery, bisect, and tags. GitHub processed 986 million commits across the platform in 2025, a 25 percent jump year over year, with 43.2 million pull requests merged in an average month (GitHub Octoverse, 2025<\/a>). Every one of those pull requests eventually gets asked about in an interview somewhere.<\/p>\n

52<\/span>Questions<\/span><\/div>
git rebase -i<\/span>Core Command<\/span><\/div>
3<\/span>Reset Modes<\/span><\/div>
2<\/span>Merge Strategies<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n

Git fundamentals: the three states, and what .git actually stores<\/h2>\n

Almost every loop opens here, even for candidates with five years of daily Git use. A candidate who describes Git as “a backup system for your code” usually can’t reason about anything downstream of that.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Easy questions<\/h2>20<\/span><\/div>
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