How To Answer "What would be your dream job?" in an Interview

Someone once asked me “What would be your dream job?” and I thought to myself that this is vague question to ask.

I tried to brake it down into smaller questions to see if I could identify the final response and came up with final 4s that were easier for me to answer. If you wish to be following these, don’t try answering everything in one go. Write each thought on a new line. This will allows you to make small progress.

Here are the questions (and how I tried answering them):

1. What work feels like play to me? What makes me forget about time?

• I love optimizing pieces of code, making it fast and as less resource intensive as possible. I like to make the machine do less work.

• I love making code look beautiful and read beautifully. Something that makes people go like: this is the art of writing code.

• I get excited when someone gives me a complex problem and asks me to do deep research on it, to find possible solutions for it. I will make diagrams, draft documents, contact people, ask questions, try hundreds of things; basically do whatever I can (bend gravity if I have to) to get the satisfaction of saying: this is what we want and here are the hows and whys of its working. I like to solve problems.

• I love to discuss ideas with people. I like to break an idea down to its smallest part and make people understand how all the small parts work and how those small parts interact with each other to eventually make a whole big thing work.

2. What would I like to improve in this world? How can I put a tiny dent on earth?

• I want to make people stop chasing instant gratifications and live a deeply satisfying life. Like the feeling of finishing a good book. I want to add value to people’s lives. How would I do that?

• I want to help people ask the right questions. Questions which they can answer easily. I want them to see the same thing from new perspectives and then simplify.

• I want to give people tools. Tools that they can use to sprint faster, tools that can be used as strong foundations to build bigger solutions, tools that can help impaired compete with the talented. I want to give people the right weapons in their arsenal.

3. What would encourage me to grow and be better?

• Being recognized for small contributions of work I’ll make for an enthusiastic team.

• Working hard on some task and presenting it to the team.

• Gaining the team’s trust that I will be able to achieve any task given to me.

• Laying out possible options to the team to help them make right decisions and get out of a rut.

4. What would I not want my future self to be?

• Being part of a large organization sitting in the middle of a hierarchy somewhere.

• Not utilizing my knowledge / understanding to improve the world around me. Not producing solutions for the world.

• Waking up and thinking that I’ve to drag myself to work. (I should be excited for my work and craft).

• Not being able to be there for my family and support them financially.

After answering the questions above, I can say that my dream job title could be:

A Software Engineer in a small team who also creates side projects and content (technical talks, blog posts, videos, podcasts, etc.) on topics like: ideas, solutions, simplifying problems, producing tools, asking right questions, etc.

But even saying that would be binding myself. So, I concluded that I am all of the above and more.

Follow Lakshya on twitter for more such posts: https://www.twitter.com/lakshyakhatri_