…in your job.
…in your job.
“In the mirror.”
After reading this, I shall tell everybody that **I ** am MEBuckner.
meb
The last time I was asked this question, I honestly said I didn’t know, but wherever I was, I hoped I was older and wiser for the experiences along the way (I didn’t get the job, but it turned out they’d already given it to someone from another department internally and were just fufilling their legal obligations to interview applicants).
Now, for the answers I wanted to give:
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Living as a God-Emperor in a small African republic with no vowels in the name after successfully staging a Revolution to overthrow the previous regime.
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Living under an assumed name in a South American country to avoid INTERPOL and their awkward investigation into the supply of Soviet Army surplus arms and armour to certain unpopular North African/Middle Eastern countries.
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Hum a Mexican piece of music whilst staring off into space and smiling inanely
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“Well, ideally I’d like to be a Porn King, with all the bitches and the generally pimpin’ lifestyle that goes with it, but realistically I’d content myself with having the Southern Hemisphere’s largest collection of lesbian porn and erotica.”
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Asking the same question to prospective lackeys, underlings, and henchmen
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“How do you know about the Five Year Plan?”
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Laugh evilly and mention something about Project Mayhem
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Tell them I’d love to answer, but the First Rule of the Five Year Plan is You Do NOT Talk About The Five Year Plan.
And I wonder why I have trouble getting a decent job… 
Damn you, iamthewalrus (:3=! 
Sometimes it’s not a reasonable question at all. Contexts differ, and I’m sure it’s a relevant question for some - if a company subscribes to the “get promoted or get out” philosophy, the job seeker should know, and so it turns into a question regarding the applicants knowledge of the company, which is fair game.
But the problem with this particular question is that it seems to be on every blasted HR drone’s short list of “questions to ask so I can filter job seekers without having to get into all that technical skills stuff that makes my head hurt so bad”. A chimpansee (put in a suit and strategically shaven) could be trained to tackle that question with grace, along with “Name a personal weakness” and the other half-dozen transparent trick questions of that character. It’s more noise than signal.
As far as I can tell from the interviews I’ve gone to here in the US, anyone asking that question is just a filter to bypass before you can get in front of the person who knows what the job is about. I played the game and gave my pat and well-rehearsed answer, but why waste everybody’s time with these silly games ?
don’t say “not here”, don’t say “not here”
“At <company>, of course!”
Worked for me.
To demonstrate that you at least have the social skills to learn how to play the silly games.
You’d be surprised how many people don’t.
What sort of questions do you think they should ask you?
And why would you consider joining a company you wouldn’t want to stay at five years or more?
And if I ask the personal weakness question, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want to hear your pat “I work too much” answer unless you can convincingly give a legitimate reason why that is a weakness.
I think it’s a legitamate question. If a company is going to invest a lot into a new employee training them and developing their skills and knowledge they’d probably like to know if the employee plans on hanging around.
If they say they are planning on working to save enough money to move to Phoenix in a couple years and want to learn what they can from the job so they can find a good job there then ‘adios’.
If they say they just bought a house in the area and are settling in for the long term and really like your company after exploring other avenues and hope to advance through the company, then that’s someone worth hiring.
Sure you can B.S. them either way but that can be said for all interview questions.
My current job, I laid it on the line - I’d been laid off two summers running, and told them I was looking to put some roots. Said I saw syself progressing to management, because my previous employers find me to be an excellent resource to do so historically. I also told them that if they didn’t have expectations that I’d be viable there (here) because of plans to outsource and etcetera, that I wouldn’t be interested. So far, it’s working out well.
Swinging from a golden parachute . . . you pobe.
Perhaps it’s my line of work (IT - large-scale computer networks), but I’d expect an interview to be mostly about what I can do and have done - and what the organization needs done. As I see it, their task is to map my skills and see if I mesh with their needs. My task is to probe the organization and see if I’d be comfortable working there - whether my skills fit the task and my attitude fits the culture. I just do not see that question moving the process forward at all. Most of my interviews have had me defending past decisions or doing network design and/or troubleshooting problems on the spot. That’s hard. The opening gambit is a bit of a bore.
Happens all the time. People in my line tend not to care that much about what company name is on the letterhead - what we do will be pretty much the same whether we work for a supermarket chain, a shipping company or a movie studio. I think of my career as a series of projects more than as a succession of jobs.
Anyone who answers a tired old question with an even more tired old answer needs to tune their interview skills, obviously.
I give a description of some minor weakness (Personal favourite: I speak incomprehensibly fast when I get enthusiastic, which also happens to be true) and how I am aware of it, the problem analysis process and the concrete steps I have taken to successfully overcome it, yadda yadda. Gets the word “enthusiastic” in there. I may even say “proactive” a couple of times. All the while waiting for the hard questions to start.
Not so sure about that. When I interviewed for the job I had before my current one, the interviewers drew a network on the whiteboard, described a set of symptoms, gave me the marker and said “Please troubleshoot”. So I worked my way through the symptoms and descriptions and diagnosed an OSPF/EIGRP route redistribution issue. That’s my kind of interview question.
Probably dead in a foreign country after being drafted into the military to fight the massive war that’s going to break out soon between the U.S. and various Arab nations.
I used to have a lot of trouble with this question, what with not having the least idea where I wanted to be in five years, but then when I got into the field that I ended up in, all of a sudden I was able to answer questions like this. Easily, in fact.
This is quite possibly the most enlightening thing I’ve ever read vis a vis employment- I suffer from a total lack of “being able to keep a job more than a few months or a year at most”, and it does cause a lot of problems for my self-esteem (not to mention my finances!).
Yet, with one sentence, you’ve managed to totally change my whole perspective on the situation. It’s as if an enormous weight has not only been lifted from my shoulders, it’s completely vanished into thin air.
My hat is doffed, and I raise my glass to you!
And on that note, I’ve got to go and get some lunch and pontificate on this new development at much greater length…
Five years?
Five years???
You fool! Don’t you realize that the aliens who have been here since Roswell have already made a deal with the United Nations? In the next 18 months the black helicopters will swoop in and net us like so many fish. People will simply disappear and there will be no record that they ever even existed. You and I and the rest of the proletariat will be taken to the processors and turned into Soylent Green for the aliens while the elite light their cigars with the worthless green paper you call “money” and drink the wine made from our blood. Can’t you see? The signs are all around! And there you sit in your office chair, behind your bureaucrat-issue desk and ask meaningless questions from a list and believe you’re helping “the company.” Five years!!! Your naivete makes me laugh. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
In the meantime, I have bills to pay. Do you have a dental plan? I need new fillings so I can hear the transmissions more clearly.
The problem with IT workers is all they want to do is sit at their desk doing IT stuff. Just as there is more to life than computers, there is more to a job than simply performing tasks. The company wants to see if you are the kind of person who in 5, 10, 15 years will be sitting at the same workstation tinkering with the network or if you have aspirations of leadership. Or maybe you will just jump ship for more money.
It’s not though. If you canstantly make lateral moves from one project to another or one company to another, pretty soon you will find yourself 45 years old and plateaued in your career, pissed off that you have to answer to bosses 10 years younger than you.
If you are unable to hold a job for more than a few months, you should try to figure out why.