You can’t teach attitude, but you have to look for it
It’s a bit of a well-kept secret that for the last few months I’ve been looking for a new role. My previous employer decided to do lay-offs in Germany and I was part of that motion. I reached out to my network the same day I got the notice and was met with compassion and a genuine will to help. Since then I’ve done countless interviews, conversations, in-person dinner meetings, presentations and PoCs for some of the most well-known technology and AI companies in the world.
I’ve been on the other side of the table as a hiring manager often enough to know that prejudice and bias are real forces when you meet a person for the first time. Walking into any interview with that in mind has always been part of my preparation. Professionalism and role fit have nothing to do with the colour of somebody’s skin or the colour they wear underneath it. They have nothing to do with their hair or lack of it, the country they were born in, their religion or their sexual orientation. Individuality and personality are not a sign of lacking competence. I’ve learned they are often a catalyst for new views, new input and new ideas. If you only look at the most experienced people in the room when facing a hard problem, you might go deaf to the good idea a junior has just brought to the table.
What surprised me most in this job search wasn’t the competition. It was the mood. Recruiters keep telling me they have hundreds of well-suited candidates applying for the same roles, which makes it borderline impossible to find the needle in the haystack based on initial impressions alone. AI is doing a lot of the pre-screening work in larger organisations and I can see why, but once you enter the human stages of the process, the environment often feels harsher and more unforgiving than it needs to be. Getting to know a person and understanding how they might bring a new angle to existing conversations no longer seems to be the goal. Many interview processes don’t test attitude. They test performance. The ability to compress a career into rehearsed stories on demand. The ability to sound confident within someone else’s rubric. That’s not hiring. That’s auditioning. And for leadership roles, it’s a costly way to get fooled. More than once I’ve looked into empty faces reciting the same questions for the tenth time that day, not even properly hearing the answers. In those conversations I received contradictory feedback: too enthusiastic, not enthusiastic enough, too bold, not bold enough, too honest. At some point I realised I no longer want to social engineer my answers into a shape that fits a process more than it fits the truth.
Over the last months I had several conversations with family and friends about the kinds of companies I am willing to work for and, in return, how I want to present myself to the world. Or more precisely: which bridges I am willing to burn for a new occupation. I’m a young, heterosexual, white male from a first world country. I know prejudice mostly by hearsay. That makes it even more important to be honest about where I stand, because the easy path for someone like me is to stay ambiguous and agreeable. Therefore I started to take a much closer look at my own boundaries.
I have a technical and economic background. I’ve done my field work and then moved into leadership roles. If you are looking for someone who writes code like a scientist fresh from university while also bringing my level of experience, you are looking for a unicorn.
I like my weekends calm and full of joy: good food, good people, time to breathe. If that clashes with your meritocracy and you need everyone to live for the hustle, then I’m not your person.
I have long hair and tattoos, but I keep myself groomed and orderly. If you believe a client won’t trust me in a suit because I have ink under my skin, your view of the world is an antiquity.
I speak openly about human rights, about oppression of minorities, about apartheid, about right-wing politics even when they try to camouflage themselves as "just conservative" and for a Europe that not only protects its own citizens but also those who seek refuge within its borders.
If it wasn't clear enough, I openly support sea rescue in the Mediterranean and I am against genocide in the Middle East.
If those views collide with you as a potential manager or as a human being in general, we would not get along, because I believe the same values should be lived openly and wholeheartedly at work as well as in private.
If a company needs me smaller, quieter, more beige and more grateful to consider me a "culture fit", then they don’t actually want my work. They want my compliance. That’s a bad trade for both sides. I’m done optimising myself into somebody else’s ideal candidate silhouette just to pass a process that confuses conformity with professionalism. My life is calm, my work is intense and I’m not apologising for that balance. I look the way I look, I lead the way I lead and I care about people in a way that will show up in how I run teams and how I behave in a room. You can teach how your stack works. You can teach domain. What you can’t teach is how someone behaves when the room is tense, the customer is angry or the roadmap collapses.
If you are hiring right now, that’s the uncomfortable mirror. Your process probably rewards polish over principle. It might even punish the exact attitude you claim to be looking for. If you want builders and grown-ups, don’t optimise for interview athletes. You can teach systems. You can teach tooling. You can teach almost every hard skill given time and willingness. But you can’t teach attitude. You can only decide whether you’re willing to look for it and whether you’re ready to accept what you’ll have to let go of if you do.
I’ve been the architect, sat beside the architect and cleaned up after the architect. Everything here was learned the hard way and in production.
