Nobody Gets Here by Accident
Berlin’s media industry presents itself as a meritocracy. In practice it’s an overstuffed room where everyone already knows each other, the good positions circulate between the same dozen portfolios, and the person who gets the job is usually the one who managed to become real to someone inside before there was ever a job to fill.
That’s more or less what Digitale Leute exists to document—the actual paths people took rather than the ones they’d put on a résumé. The project profiles creative developers, SEA managers, iOS engineers, and everyone else navigating Germany’s digital industry, and asks them to account for themselves honestly. The portraits are less inspirational than instructive, which makes them more useful.
Marimar Hollenbach is a good example. She started studying environmental science, found it wasn’t her, and began teaching herself graphic design. Then web design. Then code. She landed a placement with a mentor who took her seriously, and that meeting reorganized everything that came after. The next step was teaching myself to code,
she says. At that point I landed a placement where I had a great mentor who took me under his wing.
Her practical advice is to get into the community before you try to get a job. I actually believe that if you’re active in the community, you have a significantly higher chance of landing an interview.
I’ve watched enough people navigate this kind of industry to know she’s right. The work doesn’t find you through a job board. It finds you because you were present somewhere, said something coherent, and a person who happened to be in the same room remembered your name.
What makes these portraits worth spending time with is the variety of entry points. Different disciplines, different starting mistakes, different forms of self-teaching. The industry looks uniform from the outside—agencies, studios, tech companies, all somehow adjacent—but the internal routes are genuinely divergent. Knowing someone’s real road, the wrong turns and the lucky mentors and the accidental placements, tells you more about what’s actually required than any job listing does.
Self-discipline runs through almost every account. Not talent, not the right degree—just the capacity to keep working at something when no one is making you. That, and being willing to show up before you’re technically ready.