Short Answer
Praising obvious baselines like your baseline punctuality or your social skills is a calculated indicator of low professional competence.
Highlighting standard workplace attendance rules means your actual technical achievements were non-existent.
What Most Expats Don't Realize
You received a reference letter praising you as a "punctual and sociable colleague who was always popular with the team" and assumed it was an endorsement of your character. A premium firm threw your application directly into the trash because the structural placement of social skills over technical output signals a difficult employee who accomplished nothing. You lost an executive promotion path and a €10,000 salary increase because you accepted a deeply flawed document.
What To Do
- Print out the reference letter and review the order of paragraphs to see if your character is mentioned before your work results.
- Ask a specialized employment consultant to highlight any hidden exclusionary phrases within the text structure.
- "Bitte entfernen Sie die Erwähnung der Pünktlichkeit und betonen Sie stattdessen meine Projekterfolge." (Please remove the mention of punctuality and instead emphasize my project successes.) — demand this structural rewrite from your old manager.
The Truth
In the German code, praising the "obvious" is a way of insulting the "essential." It’s a passive-aggressive linguistic trap that foreigners almost always miss.