Also here:
My response is always “Being gainfully employed.”
Older.
This question is a simple skills test to determine how well you kiss ass. “I see myself with x years seniority in a job I love and x more years until a well deserved and comfortable retirement.”
I think far too many responses here are from those that neither need nor want the job, but if that were true you would never have applied for it in the first place let alone gone to the interview. My response above assumes that I actually need and want the position offered.
Complete honesty.
“I don’t think that’s a weakness.”
Who cares what you think?
Right- you want to show that you’ve got long term-ish plans, and that you want to be upwardly mobile within their company. Show you’re a go-getter and all that stuff. But you don’t want to position yourself as a threat or too much of a barracuda either.
So something along the lines of “worked into progressively more responsible positions, hopefully promoted” is probably safe, without saying “I want X position”, or setting up any goals they perceive as unreasonable/unreachable. They’re not going to want someone who answers that question with something that’s unreasonable, because that indicates that you’re likely to bounce if you don’t get exactly the career path you’re aiming for. Nor do you want to set yourself up as a threat to your boss or other people in the department/company, that is if you’re interviewing for the sort of job where you are perceived as capable of doing that.
True story: a friend working at a data center decided that a particular manager was intolerable. So he convinced her manager that she need to be replaced. Nobody told this woman that this was going on, of course.
They get a friend of my friend in to interview, and because this woman’s short tenure is a secret, she’s on the interview list. When she interviews him, she asks, “What position do you see yourself in at this company?” and he looks her straight in the eye and say, “Yours.”
And he got the job. Brutal.
“Tell me what the world looks like in five years, and I’ll make a good faith effort to explain my anticipated/preferred role in that world.”
Peter Griffin managed to avoid the impulse to say “Doing your wife,” but only by changing it at the last second to “Doing your… son.”
Agree w the joking responses that the only sound response to this nonsense is withering contempt.
But back in the real world the “right” answer sure depends on whether the job is management track, drone worker track, or tech / science track. Utterly different jobs deserve utterly different legit answers.
The last time I was asked that question, I gave a very vague answer along the lines of, “I intend to continue to develop my technical skills in order to be a valuable contributor to the team.”
The job was marketing adjacent - applications engineering - which at that company was very marketing focused and not very engineering centered. I did get the job, and I sucked at it and was eventually fired for not being able to persuade a customer into buying a serious turkey of a product. In retrospect, I should have walked out the moment the hiring manager asked such a stupid question.
I was told that one WRONG answer is “working for myself”. Dont say it
I would take a piece of paper, put all sorts of math calculations on it for 5 minutes, then give them a latitude and a longitude.
“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
Playing 3rd base for the Mets.
“What’s your biggest weakness?”
I can’t hit a curveball. Or a fastball. Or any pitch, actually.