'Tell me about a time you went against your values at work': Reddit can't agree on what this interview question is even asking
A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell narrated their experience about when they were asked by an interview panel to describe a time they had to go against their values while employed. They drew a blank. Their logic: if they had been asked to do something against their values, they would have left the job.
They told the panel they had no example, that their values had always aligned with what their employers asked of them, and that if something crossed a line they would raise it openly.
“What kind of dumb question is that?” they wrote emphatically, suggesting that “tell me about an ethical dilemma you faced” would have been a far clearer way to get at whatever the panel was actually trying to understand.
What Reddit said
The thread produced something rarer than the usual job market frustration: a genuine debate about what the question is actually designed to do.
Several commenters were simply baffled. “That's a crazy question. I honestly can’t think of the answer they want to hear. Like yeah but I did anyway I guess?” one wrote. Another admitted: “I don’t understand what sort of information they’d gather from asking this.”
One commenter offered a wry response that captured a specific industry’s relationship with the question: “My answer would just be ‘I used to work in sales.’” Another had lived the literal answer: “I used to do collections for one of the biggest credit card companies in the world, so basically everything the company did was against my values.”
The most interesting part of the thread was a direct disagreement about intent. One commenter argued the question is a values integrity check, saying “They want to hear that you don’t go against your values and you wouldn’t break the law if asked. They can’t literally ask you if you’d break the law, so this is asking that in a roundabout way. The answer is a solid, emphatic no.”
However, another commenter pushed back immediately: “I was actually thinking the opposite. They might be testing the waters to see if you would be willing to go against your morals for the sake of the company, or perhaps do something shady but not necessarily illegal. There are definitely jobs out there that prefer people of that mindset.”
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The original poster’s instinct that the question was poorly worded is fair. “Tell me about an ethical dilemma you faced at work” asks for the same underlying information without the bizarre implication that going against your values is something candidates are expected to have done and be comfortable discussing. The current phrasing is either lazy or deliberate, and which one it is tells you something about the organisation asking it.
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