A few days ago, during a management away day, we did one of those colour personality exercises. There were around 15 managers in the room, and I was the only blue. Everyone else was mainly green, yellow or red. I know it was only an exercise, and four colours cannot explain a whole person, but I have not really stopped thinking about it since.
Blue was meant to be the analytical one. The person who wants to know why something happened, how it works, what the evidence says and whether there is a better way to do it. That felt very much like me. I have always needed to understand things properly. I do not just want an answer, I want to know how someone got to it. I want to look at the details, find the gaps and keep going until it makes sense.
Being the only blue made me think about something bigger. Have I spent years trying to fit into environments that do not really show what I am good at?
I am autistic and have ADHD. When something interests me, I can become completely absorbed in it. I can learn a new skill, work out how something works and start building with it very quickly. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes days, sometimes hours. I get interested in something, research it, experiment with it and keep going until I understand it. Most of my technical skills have come from doing exactly that.
I did not have a perfectly planned route into software development, automation or AI. I got curious, started learning and then kept making more complicated things. Learning has never really been the hard part. The hard part has been showing people what I can do.
There is a gap between knowing what I am capable of and being able to prove it through the usual routes into a new career. Interviews are a good example. You are asked to remember the right example, explain it in a certain structure and sound confident while doing it. For some people that might work fine. For me, it can show the worst version of me.
I can struggle to think of the right example at the exact moment I need it. I can get distracted trying to structure the answer properly. Then I am thinking about whether I am talking for too long, whether I am making enough eye contact and whether I am answering in the way they want. What I actually know can get lost underneath all of that.
Give me a real problem though, and you would see something different. Give me something to investigate, improve or build. Let me ask questions, explore it and follow the evidence. Judge me on what I create and how I got there. That is when I can properly show how I think.
I know I still need to communicate my work and explain myself. That matters. But doing well in an interview is not always the same thing as doing the job well. For a long time, I think I have been waiting for someone to see past the interview and recognise what I could do. But I have not made that easy either.
Over the years I have learned skills, written articles, made tools and built things I am proud of. Most of it has stayed hidden. Some things never got published because I told myself they were not finished. Other things did not feel good enough. I worried that someone with more experience would look at them and point out everything wrong with them.
Even when I finished something, I would usually move onto the next idea instead of showing anyone. Hiding felt safer. If nobody saw it, nobody could criticise it. I could keep improving it privately and say I would share it when it was ready, but ready kept moving.
There was always another feature to add, another bit to rewrite or another problem to solve. A simple project would become so complicated that I did not even know how to explain it anymore. Then I would lose momentum and move on. I kept learning, but I did not leave much evidence behind for people to see. I knew what I could do, but I was expecting people to discover it without giving them much to discover.
I am still working out where I fit. Being the only blue manager did not suddenly give me the answer, but it made something clearer. I have spent a lot of time trying to prove myself through systems that do not always bring out the best in me, while hiding the work that would probably show people my abilities better than anything else.
I cannot control every recruitment process. I cannot make people immediately understand how my brain works or what I could bring to something. But I can control what I do next. I can keep learning, keep building things that interest me and start sharing the work I have kept hidden.
It does not all need to be perfect. Every project does not need to become a successful product, and every article does not need to contain a completely original idea. It just needs to exist outside my computer. I need to show people how I approach problems and what I can actually do.
Interviews may always be difficult for me. I might never be the person who can immediately pull out the perfect example and say it with complete confidence. But an interview does not have to be the only thing people see. The things I create can speak for me too. I may still be working out where I belong, but I am no longer going to keep everything hidden while I do it.