What are some values that are important to you and how have they influenced your work?
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What is this question about
Interviewers use this question to see whether your values are real operating principles or just polished words. They want evidence that your stated values actually shape how you make decisions, work with others, and respond when tradeoffs appear. At higher levels, they also look for whether your values scale beyond personal style into how you influence teams or organizations.
Key Insights
- You should pick values that create visible tradeoffs in real work. 'I value quality' or 'I value teamwork' is too generic unless you show a moment where that value changed what you did.
- Don't just define a value; show its behavioral footprint. The strongest answers make it easy for the interviewer to see how your choices, habits, and relationships were different because of that value.
- Be careful not to choose values that accidentally signal inflexibility. If your answer makes you sound rigid, moralizing, or unaware of competing constraints, a strong value can land as a collaboration risk.
What interviewers probe atlevel
Top Priority
At junior level, interviewers mainly want proof that your values show up in day-to-day actions, not just in how you describe yourself.
Good examples
🟢A value that's important to me is reliability. On a small feature I owned, I started sending a short update when I found a blocker instead of waiting until standup, because I realized silence made it harder for my mentor to help me early.
🟢I value learning in the open. When I was unsure about a bug fix, I wrote down what I'd tried and what I thought was happening before asking for help, which made the discussion faster and helped me improve my debugging process.
Bad examples
🔴One value that's important to me is excellence. I always try to do my best and make sure everything is high quality.
🔴I really value teamwork, so I like working well with people and being supportive on projects.
Weak answers stop at identity labels; strong answers show repeated, observable behaviors that would let other people recognize the value in practice.
Valuable
Example answers atlevel
Great answers
A value that's important to me is reliability. In my last internship, I owned a small internal tool improvement, and I realized pretty quickly that being 'almost done' wasn't very useful to the engineer mentoring me if I was actually blocked on one part. I started sending a short update whenever I hit an issue, including what I had tried and what I thought the problem was. That helped me get unstuck faster, and it also made me more careful about understanding my work instead of just waiting for rescue. Since then, I've tried to make reliability mean that people can trust both my work and my communication.
One value that matters a lot to me is empathy. I worked on a customer support team while helping with a few small product updates, and I learned that even minor changes can affect people in very different ways depending on their situation. That pushed me to ask better questions before starting work, like who will use this and what problem are we really trying to solve. I also value learning, because as a junior person I know I don’t have all the answers yet, and I’ve found that being curious helps me grow faster and make fewer assumptions. In practice, that has meant taking notes after feedback, asking for examples when I’m unsure, and trying to understand the reason behind a request instead of just completing the task. Those habits have made my work more thoughtful and easier for teammates to build on.
Poor answers
I'd say one of my main values is excellence. I always try to do high-quality work and hold myself to a really high standard. In school and during my internship, that meant spending a lot of time making sure everything was correct before I showed it to anyone. I think that's important because it shows professionalism and keeps the bar high.
Question Timeline
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Mid July, 2026
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