The other day, the Oatmeal guy posted a comic about the “6 Crappiest Interview Questions”. Number One on his list is, without question, the absolute worst — the dreaded “Where do you see yourself in five years?” The other five suck pretty hard, too, and I realized by the time I got to the end of the comic that I had never had a job interview in my life that did not consist almost exclusively of these six questions. Well, maybe one, but that’s it, tops. I did have one job interview once where I stood up and left before the guy could even ask any questions because his description of the job was so awful that I didn’t even want to bother with wasting my time (or his), but I am dead sure that if we’d gotten to that he was going to hit every one of these.
And yet I don’t think I ever came up with any answers that were adequate to these questions, either. The comic not only nails the questions, it also nails the inevitably stupid and useless answers most people give, and I know that I have given them all (except “Operation Pee-Pee Storm”). So I wonder if the universality of this is just so total that there isn’t even a point in having job interviews. I think it lays bare the entire lie of conducting interviews; whoever is doing the hiring simply decides who they like the best and that’s that, everything else is dross. All the empty posturing is simply kabuki theater that no one seems to know how to abandon.
