What is your dream job given your skills, your resources and ability, that you could operate at within a week.
Setting aside hyperbole, I can think of several practical things I'd rather do than what I'm doing now, but I don't do them because they don't pay well, and I enjoy my current profession well enough.
If I could set my own salary, I'd like to run a barbecue restaurant, write for a newspaper, make computer games, or build robots. However, none of those pay well enough (or I lack the credentials--and time to get the credentials--to make them pay well enough), so they are relegated to hobbies.
> I immediately exclude discussion of company, title, and salary, because these are the things people think they want but can't really affect my decision.
> So by stating that these three things, company, title, and salary, are already taken care of, it frees candidates to think about what really matters to them.
Most people have something else they would be doing if salary weren't a constraint. So the honest answer isn't likely to be a job like the one the candidate is interviewing for, but most people will be dishonest and say that the job they are applying for is their dream job because that's what they think the interviewer wants.
Except it is. I earn 3x more as an enterprise developer than I could as a games developer and work significantly fewer hours.
The truth is spending time with my family, and having the money to support them, is more important than having my "ideal" job.
> It's at your ideal company with your ideal job title and salary.
This means that your title/company/salary is already set in the question.