People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.
Sounds like dating ;)
In my short list (ignoring years of time wasted travelling), i have only met 1 yes man. He came from money, and sales. Owned 4 large businesses, and would over promise, under deliver and over receive ALWAYS.
So what are your experiences like and from where?
I think no backbone can be a personality trait, sure. But it is NOT a trait of 'need' and action, in my experience.
I'd like to focus on Dating because I disagree with your offhand comment, even though it was in jest and is probably more cynical than you are in person.
> The more … apathetic ill be cherished. Sounds like dating ;)
Feeling bad makes your behavior suffer. Being angry makes you less nice to people. Being tired means you don't engage with people. Being scared or anxious makes you hide your vulnerabilities and close yourself off. I'm not saying that badly behaved people deserve to be ignored, I'm acknowledging that it is uncomfortable to interact with people who are hurting.
Being "driven and hungry" while dating makes you behave worse. It makes you over-eager to please the other person, and it flattens out your personality. Instead of focusing on making the person like you, you should be exploring whether you like each other. A date can be successful even if the two of you don't end up dating because you two would not make a good couple.
Some companies will only hire those who are desperate and will do anything. I assume, hopefully correctly, that those are the companies not worth working for, so instead I use the interview opportunity to get better at interviewing. Because these companies want to take advantage of their employees, I do not feel bad wasting their time.
I interviewed at a few places for some really easy, fun-looking jobs while I was doing freelancing. I didn't care if I got the jobs, but they did look trivially easy compared to what I'd been doing earlier in my career. Surprisingly though, after making it through all the technical people and talking to the CEO in every case, I never got the job.
Later on I applied to a really awesome job at a FAANG-class megacorp, and the hiring manager's manager called me. He said "Look, you've gotten the highest marks I've ever seen for a candidate. Everyone loved you. But I have a hunch that you aren't going to be dedicated to this job. So before we move forward, I want your personal promise that you aren't planning to just hop ship in 6 months to start a company or something"
I was JUST starting to get nervous about finding a new job at this point. My consulting work had dried up, I was down to about 3 months' worth of cash, and I was thinking about selling my car to get a few more months' runway while I grind Leetcode in order to be able to pass the bar at Google.
So you can imagine how shocked I was to hear that this guy thought his awesome senior engineer FAANG job wasn't good enough for me. I promised to stick it out, got the job, and so far it's been my favorite job of all time (other than the glorious week where my crypto trading bot was working well and just printing free money..)