The Teachers Who Bet Against Us - And Lost Every Single Time

July 14, 2026 SupportTrenches Stories & Case Studies 5 minutes

Here is a fun statistic nobody keeps: how many careers get quietly strangled in a classroom before they ever begin. No dashboard for that. No postmortem. Just a tired adult with tenure telling a kid to give up, and the kid believing them.

Many years ago I attended a vocational school for information technology. It was there, ironically, that I met some of the most incompetent people I have ever encountered in IT. Not the students. The teachers.

They were all civil servants. Which in Germany means roughly the professional equivalent of a load-bearing wall - you can repaint it, you can complain about it, but you are not removing it. Performance was optional. Consequences were theoretical. And a few of them wore this like a medal. One openly bragged about his failure rates, as if drowning students early was a public service. In his mind he was a filter, weeding out the untalented before they could embarrass the profession.

Let me introduce you to three of the people he filtered.

👉 The foreigner who came to IT through a broken body.

The first kid had already finished an apprenticeship in a skilled trade. Loved it, was good at it, had a plan. Then a village festival, a fight he did not start, and an injury that ended his ability to do the work he had trained for. The employment office paid for a two year retraining program into IT. That was the deal, and the deal had no plan B. No completion meant no more support. On top of that, he carried a very specific cultural weight - the fear of disappointing his family, which for him was not a mood but a load-bearing beam of his entire identity.

He was fighting on three fronts at once. His native language, our language, and English, because half of IT is just English wearing a lab coat. He clawed his way through two years of it.

Our teacher repeatedly, explicitly advised him to quit. Saw no chance. None.

Today that man runs the entire global printer network for one of the largest car manufacturers on the planet. Every time a factory floor prints a label, somewhere his infrastructure quietly does its job. Which is more than the teacher ever did.

👉 The half-orphan with dyslexia.

He had lost his father a few years earlier to a workplace accident. Then came a dyslexia diagnosis - trouble distinguishing letters, in the broadest sense a reading difficulty. Brilliant kid. Curious, open, technically sharp. Probably a bit on the spectrum too, but that is a different article.

Same script from the teacher: the reading difficulty produces careless mistakes on exams, therefore no realistic chance of passing. Filed under hopeless.

So he did something the teacher never considered - he attacked the actual problem. Specialized training, a measurable drop in his error rate. Finished the program. Then went on to study software engineering.

If you drive a German car, there is a decent chance the code controlling your fuel injection pump was written in part by the boy who could not read properly.

👉 The one who was bad at maths.

Top student. Ones and twos in nearly everything. And a flat six in maths, thanks to Asperger's, which made learning anything he found boring - and maths was boring to him - almost physically impossible. On day one he told the teacher exactly this: I struggle with maths, and especially with the way you teach it, fast and dense. The teacher's reply was that in that case he was probably in the wrong profession.

Small detail. Math was a minor subject.

Then other students started struggling too. The thing got escalated to the principal. Turned out this teacher had a trail of math casualties across multiple classes. He could not be fired and could not be transferred - see load-bearing wall above. So the school did the only thing left: every student at risk of failing purely because of him got bumped from a six to a five (F and D-). You genuinely cannot defend flunking a kid with a 1.4 average score (which is the rough equivalent to an A-/B+).

That student became an escalation engineer at a large US tech company. He is also writing the article you are currently reading. Whether that counts as a valuable contribution to society, feel free to debate.

Here is the part worth keeping.

Three kids. All three were told, by a person with a title and a pension, to walk away. If all three had obeyed, all three would have ended up on the street. Instead one keeps a global corporation printing, one helps your engine run, and one writes for your amusement on a Saturday evening.

The teacher was not evil. He was just certain. And certainty in an incompetent person is the most expensive thing in any organization - because it looks exactly like authority. Same posture, same confidence, same tone. The only difference is the outcome, and by the time you see the outcome, the damage is done. I have watched grown senior engineers do the identical thing to junior colleagues. "Not cut out for this." Said with total conviction, backed by zero evidence, immune to consequence.

The people who actually make it are seldom the ones who fit the filter. They are the ones who had a reason to keep going that was bigger than one man's opinion. A family. A body that forced a second chance. A brain wired differently that still, somehow, found the door.

So if you are a student, or you have kids who are students, and you hit a teacher, a manager, or a "mentor" who has already decided that you cannot, do not confuse their certainty with truth. Question the supposed authority. Fight for what you believe is right. Escalate when the wall will not move. The worst thing that authority ever did was convince talented people it was measuring them when it was really just measuring itself.

The filter was never sorting talent. It was sorting obedience.

Who told you to quit - and where are they now? 👇

This article is also available in German.

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