One of the things we didn't expect when building CNTR was a pattern we kept seeing in CVs. Incredible technical or academic career starts, strong first steps — and then a shift into management roles. Followed by the loss of the technical edge. We saw it again and again.
Career changes are not a bad thing, and the world needs great managers. But the pattern hints at something deeper: Europe has crafted an environment where becoming and staying an exceptional tech worker is harder than it would be in the US. Where the individual contributor path — especially at the highest levels — is neither valued nor rewarded as equally as it should be.
Ale and I were both at Apple, in different teams and at different times. I got a good look at the teams and work at SPG (Special Projects). The team in Cupertino came from all over the world, including many Germans. Between that experience and my own background at KIT, I've worked with researchers and engineers from some of the world's best universities across continents. I came out of it with one clear conviction: there is no large quality gap between the best countries. Some stereotypes hold — US graduates tend to be stronger at bold self-marketing — but the overall quality level is comparable.
So the talent and academic foundation is here. The question is what happens to it.
Three Career Paths for Exceptional Tech Contributors
From conversations with many candidates, and the inside experience in US tech, I see three directions for a strong tech contributor after education and a solid start:
1. Coast. Level out the ambition and settle for a slightly above-average outcome. Reaching the upper echelons of technology is HARD work and not everybody wants to fight on the frontier for a decade. The "coast" strategy accepts a significant career slowdown but gains an increase in comfort. You can still get top-10% compensation, enough for a decent living.
2. Move into management. One brilliant candidate crystallized this for us. He had a solid background with experience that matched his education, and we saw sparks of technical brilliance suitable for a tech role and asked if this would be inspiring for him. His reply was that he was already in a managerial role and this would be a career step back.
This hints at a big problem, the expectation that in Europe the transition from individual contributor to a managerial track is the "natural" career progression. On an intuitive level, we expect managerial roles to indicate a successful career move and to be more valuable and better compensated.
Managers with a strong technical background are successful key players in many organizations. But management is a very different role. Your output is not your own thoughts, designs, and implementations but your team's. Excelling at it requires different skills, and not everybody enjoys them. I've met quite a few people who were unhappy with the challenges of management after transitioning from a technical role and either suffered through it or moved to Strategy #1.
3. Become an excellent individual contributor. This is HARD work — few people bring both the skill and the dedication. It requires that the persistence people put into their university education is kept up and directed towards depth and mastery. Often young people love this idea but feel there is no clear path to follow. You can achieve it on your own with an internet connection, but that's brutally difficult — you want an environment that supports you. A team that operates at the highest level. A bold mission. Mentors who are already further along and a culture that encourages them to help.
This requires an organization to have a strong dual career ladder. An organization that allows individual contributors to advance to the highest levels in their careers without forcing them into management roles. Achieved by offering different parallel paths: one for management and one for technical or specialized expertise. In an organization that recognizes excellence and retains top talent by rewarding deep technical skills, innovation, and expertise with higher pay and status equivalent to top management roles.
Many people who want to follow this direction move to the US tech sector, where this strategy and these roles are more established and thus easier to find.
Every one of these strategies is a respectable choice. There is no right or wrong. But if your heart is yearning for technical excellence, if you want to change the world by creating technology, don't let yourself be told that you have to go into management to advance, or that you've plateaued after a handful of years. The times are changing, and even in Europe people understand that "how many people do you manage" is just one measure of success. Without the wizards who can solve problems only a small number of people in the world can, we are missing a crucial ingredient to build the future.
For an AI R&D start-up like CNTR
The foundation of the tech team we're currently building consists of #3 exclusively. And thus we have to tell many #2 candidates to move on. From my experience the ratio between #2 and #3 is different in the US — maybe because the biggest tech companies are located there and establish their lead through their technology. But it's also a chicken-and-egg problem: if you dominate with superior tech you can incentivize these roles, but if you don't build the environments for exceptional tech talent to thrive you may never reach the same level of tech dominance.
We decided from the first conversations that CNTR is a global company. There will be offices in America, Asia and the Middle East eventually. But we are building the initial core team in Frankfurt, and we put serious effort into making it an environment where #3 is the natural path.
This starts with Ale and me interviewing every tech candidate jointly. These are the most important decisions we make right now. This creates bottlenecks, also for the candidates, but we believe it's a price well worth paying. We also ask every team member to plan for spending time with us and their future colleagues in person, because we believe the long whiteboard conversations over pizza can create the kind of joint thinking that the best teams have. Where certain terms and ways of thinking are so much in sync that you understand each other almost without words and can bounce even complex and novel ideas off one another with a wild and exciting dynamic. Frankfurt's logistics are a big plus here: there is no city this well-connected to every relevant hub, with the main station and airport so close to the city center.
With the decision not to compromise on quality, we make sure that we can offer a welcoming environment for phenomenal people. This includes a culture of ownership and the ability to shape this company, as well as globally competitive compensation that matches the standards of our future international hubs.
One of the questions we ask many candidates is: "Imagine a team that is building one of the most important technologies of the next decade, everyone at the top of their field. And you can have any role in this team. What are you doing? What are you so passionate about that the thought of being able to uncompromisingly commit to it feels almost overwhelming?". This is what we want everyone to be able to focus on. And for the best tech wizards I've met the answer was always: building amazing technology.