Integrity and Honesty

Show that you tell the truth when it costs you something: about your own mistakes, about status and results, and about problems other people would rather not hear.

Overview

Integrity questions ask about a time telling the truth, or keeping your word, was hard. The pressure is usually ordinary: a deadline, a good-looking number, a manager who wants a green status, a mistake nobody else has noticed. The interviewer wants to know whether people can trust what you say, especially when the truth makes you or your team look worse.

This topic is about your own honesty: owning mistakes, reporting status and results truthfully, and disclosing known problems. For concerns about what a product does to its users, such as privacy, fairness or a harmful feature, see Handling Ethical Dilemmas.

The ACM Code of Ethics, the code of a large professional society for computing, states these duties plainly.

  • 1.3 Be honest and trustworthy — Disclose a system's limitations and potential problems; never make false or misleading claims or fabricate data; be honest about the limits of your competence; honor commitments
  • 2.5 Give comprehensive and thorough evaluations — Give objective, credible evaluations; report issues that might result in major risk to the appropriate parties
  • 2.6 Perform work only in areas of competence — If you lack the expertise a task needs, disclose it to your employer
  • Temptation — Names the easy choice and why it pulled — Pretends there was no pressure
  • Ownership — 'I made the mistake, I raised it' — Blames the tool, the process or a teammate
  • Timing — Told people as soon as the facts were checked — Waited until after the review, or until asked
  • Correction — Fixed the record and the cause — Fixed the bug quietly
  • Cost — Accepts a real cost without resentment — 'It all worked out and I was praised'

What you will be able to do

  • Tell one honesty story where telling the truth had a real cost.
  • Own a mistake in an interview without either hiding it or dwelling on it.
  • Report a slipping project or a weak result truthfully, with a plan.
  • Handle a teammate's or manager's dishonesty through the right channel.
  • Keep the tone calm and fair, not self-righteous.

Interview questions

  • Tell me about a time you did the right thing when it was difficult or costly.
  • Tell me about a mistake you made that nobody else had noticed. What did you do?
  • Have you ever been pressured to make status or results look better than they were?
  • What would you do if you found out a teammate or your manager had been dishonest or broken a rule?
  • You find a serious security flaw the day before launch. What do you do?
  • Tell me about a time you told leadership something they did not want to hear.

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