How does a successful career look like

I had to replace my sick colleague today for an interview. As an Engineering Manager I do a lot of interviews as the hiring manager. Today's interview I was in the panel to test the candidate's ability & humility.

My last question to this candidate was:

What does success look like for you in your career?

Working with interesting people

The candidate has a music background. And he said he would answer this question from a musician's point of view.

Success to him would be getting to work with more interesting people.

As a musician, he would like to pair with a person to be able to play the best music and this what he expected out of his career too.

Software as gardening

He said, writing code was like gardening. Things don't go as expected all the times, you need to sow the seeds carefully and wait till it flourishes.

You need to prune the weeds --> refactoring.

I concluded the interview on the following note:

There are bugs in both places! Software & gardening.