Companies should live by their development values.

I recently had one of the best interviews of my career. The case study went well, the conversation was genuine, and I felt completely in my element. I left energized and proud of how it went. It felt like a real fit.

A few weeks later, the feedback arrived. Kind tone, disappointing conclusion. The reason: they needed someone with more experience managing stakeholders at a global scale.

Everything else was positive: my leadership approach, how I work with people, my technical perspective. That one gap was enough to close the door.

The process itself was good

To be fair, the company designed the interview well. No trick questions, no surprise whiteboard challenges, no “here’s a complex system, design it in 45 minutes with no context.” They shared interview tips ahead of time, gave room to prepare, and ran the case study with enough structure that I could actually show what I know.

I’ve been through the opposite enough times to know that’s not standard. Some companies treat hiring as a stress test and call it rigor. This one treated it as a conversation about real skills. That part was genuinely good. Which made the gap between the process and the outcome harder to reconcile.

The gap between what’s written and what’s practiced

When I read the rejection, I went back to the job description. Global stakeholder management wasn’t mentioned anywhere in it. The company had recently re-posted the role. No changes. What they did have, prominently, was a statement about how seriously they take personal and professional development.

“We take your personal and professional development goals seriously, and we support them through training, coaching, and mindfulness, as well as with an open feedback culture.”

If development is a genuine value, then a candidate who identifies their gap, articulates it clearly, and has a plan for closing it should be more interesting, not less. That’s the behavior the value is supposed to produce. What happened instead was the opposite: a gap that isn’t even in the job description became the deciding factor.

The result is a company that hires the people who already have every qualification while telling everyone they believe in developing people. You can’t develop someone who already checks every box. That’s not development. It’s acquisition.

What actually taking a chance on someone looks like

When I hire developers, I look for potential first. I’m explicit about the gaps I see and I discuss them in the interview. I want to know whether the candidate is aware of those gaps and has thought about how to address them. That tells me more about how they’ll grow than a résumé that matches the job description perfectly.

The engineers who have grown the most on my teams weren’t always the ones who arrived most qualified. They were the ones who were honest about what they didn’t know yet and committed to learning it. That combination, self-awareness plus accountability, is what development culture is actually supposed to select for.

Hiring someone with room to grow takes more confidence than hiring someone with a matching résumé. It means betting on trajectory instead of current state. That bet is sometimes wrong. But it’s the one that produces the leaders your company needs in three years, not just the contributor you need right now.

Culture is what you do when you have to choose

Culture is not the career page. It’s what the organization decides when there’s a choice between the safe option and the promising one.

I didn’t get that job. It was genuinely disappointing. But I left with more clarity than I went in with: about what I bring, where I want to grow, and what kind of organization I want to work in. An organization that practices development rather than just describing it is a real thing. It’s just rarer than the career pages suggest.

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