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This is my favorite question! My answer is always something that ties together my entire career. That changes over time (obviously), but my current answer is something like this: "I like telling stories. I'm an engineer, for sure: my degree is actually in physics, and I worked my way out of that, eventually ending up as the first engineer in a Providence startup. When we were acquired, though, I found that I was really good at explaining not only what we did, but _why_ we did what we did. I moved into sales, closed our first 100 customers, and ended up running the marketing team. When you're small, storytelling is explaining to one person why your product is important. Marketing is just scaling that. No matter what, I want to understand at a technical level what's happening, then help close that gap to make it interesting to people, whether that's in code, sales, or marketing." It might be apparent that I'm not a straight-up engineer anymore, but I do think it's hugely valuable to point out why you've taken a different path from others, or what drives you. Making it a single truth that guides everything you do (knowing that that's wildly untrue) makes it easy for the interviewer to ask you more in that frame. |