I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.
Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.
Great comment, I like the "managing up" part, I'll share that with her. I think this is actually a solid piece of explaining part of the puzzle. Her entire focus was on her team, she's always been taking care of that part first. The dude who ran the train off the rails has zero interest in her and her peers (part of who have also been let go now), so it's likely he's been doing a great job managing the story from his level upwards. The Gervais principle was just posted a moment ago by someone else, I enjoyed reading that!
The term is "corporate psychopath". These are people that just do not see other people as people. I was a director (via an acquisition) for a global-mega-corp and it's literally a fucking game for the people at the top.
> even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
The reason this is so important, both in government and in private business, is that these people decide nothing, until you get to the very top. And the ones at the very top are terrified of actually making any decision. They're at the top and what they're currently doing obviously brought them there. A change? Seriously? They carry out decisions from above them. The reason they want people who deflect blame from the decisions is, yes, to protect themselves, but also to make sure the person they work for can protect themselves, after forcing the wrong decisions downwards.
Companies, and governments, hold on to ideas decades (and governments: centuries) after they've lost their usefulness. You want to get far in education? You find a way to explain why knowledge of Latin determines success in life in 2026, and you learn to make this argument without giving the slightest hint it's not your actual opinion, without insulting Latin teachers, and without insulting administrators.
The problem is, of course, that if you chose the sane option, that Latin is about as important in 2026 as the remaining 2 years in the career of the long-since-senile senior education minister are likely to be ... you will not have any further need to worry about managing up.
Really makes you want to audit ALL communications of the most sociopathic people in your organization and ask an AI to construct the true narrative based on activity and communication logs. Even on any personal devices.
Although those slippery people will just begin to perform for the AI as well.
These folks know that tendency (and in some cases actively did these things to get the leverage they have!), so good luck doing it without getting caught.
>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?
There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.
If an army general orders a disastrous assault that completely fails, they might get demoted or relieved of command. The infantry that were ordered to charge the machine guns pay a much higher price (as do the junior officers that lead the charge). Hell, perhaps nowerdays they'll have a 'blameless postmortem' to 'learn lessons' and there won't even be a demotion.
Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.
Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.
Just to add another item to the list others have brought up :
Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.
In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.
thank you for that, I actually enjoyed reading this. that's also sort of what I was hoping to find in response to my thoughts here; other people who've sorted through the mess to try and find some (even if comical) sense in it all.
No I'm real, but I've actually refreshed here, saw the link, saw Dilbert mentioned, felt sad about how much joy that used to give me many years ago and how awkwardly that all ended, and off I was reading through it. Only note I have on the article is it'll be a bit too soon to mention to her that she's represented by the loser category in this theory :)
(p.s., my poor English should actually quickly give away that I'm even too lazy to auto-correct, that's the last thing AI will take from me, ha!)
That's a more noble aspect of framing the question, and I guess I could even see why someone may try to not kamikaze themselves out of a financially very juicy system even if it was their own actions causing the trouble. However, they all operate in some form of management mesh, so clearly, one level up or across the line must notice or know who caused the chaos?
Maybe it is the nature of how failure is expressed at that level, to know a team of 30 has been let go and is not available as your extended arm to execute anymore. So, where it manifests as a job loss at a level lower, it is merely a limitation of power for them.
> Why don't people take accountability for their actions?
This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.
If you compare with work that’s contracted out, it’s quite similar. When a company does poorly, it will cut its budgets and spend less, so its suppliers lose business. Whether or not anyone at the company takes the blame for it is a separate issue.
The people who do good work are typically orthogonal to the people who spend all their time bragging about what they did and taking credit for other people's work, and blaming other people for their mistakes - and the squeakiest wheels get the grease.
I don't believe that your description of your partner or your partner's boss have any relation whatsoever to objective reality. You even admit this yourself - "I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but..." The only thing I can take from this is that someone you like got fired and someone you didn't like did the firing.
So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.
I am not in one, but from what I heard the answer is sort of. You usually end up with two corrupt power hierarchies fighting each other - the corporation and the union. That's better than just being subject to the whims of one that's aligned against you, but it's not ideal.
I think it’s the same pattern playing out as in politics - even the dumbest people get too powerful, too lucky or too influential to even realize the problem. But its often beneficial to large enough amount of bad actors who play along and support.
Suppose some top executive has a choice - do something right for long term success of a company vs something sketchy and detrimental but get huge yearly bonus in the pocket.
Are you rock solid you yourself would always go with the right thing?
They are accidentally smart. They have stumbled across the behavioral patterns that get rewarded without consciously thinking much about how to find the behavioral patterns that get rewarded. Which is mostly getting the people above you in the power pyramid to like you, and no relationship to technical skill.
The overall problem can be summarised as we don't live in a meritocracy.
Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.
Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
An ugly truth is that corporations are built on a feudal structure (kings, lords, barons, earls, etc.) that is inherently autocratic and disguises autocratic action as efficient leadership. I like to think that cooperative business structures are less vulnerable to autocratic corruption, but they need to be on guard, watching out for people willing to exploit others to gain more power and try to keep them from finding their way onto paths to power.
They do. How many times do people on HN say "my manager won't let me write tests"? That's not true, 99% of the time they could just write tests and their manager wouldn't block it, but they ask for specific time blocked out to write tests and that's what gets denied. They're trying to push the responsibility for testing off to the manager.
Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.
Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.
So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".
Hierarchy is the default because it is so simple. Designing alternative structures for responsibility raises lots of unexpected complexity. A good example of this is the Benefit Corporation idea which is gaining support and polish over time, but still involves considerable legal challenges. Being answerable to stakeholders and employee owned is very unlike answering to stockholders who own everything.
I am surprised that you even ask this question. Do you expect it to be different?
It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.
Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.
break everything up, "official" lines of comunication, phone, email, that are essentialy black holes, then a maze of second, third,fourth level worklings who
always refer you to someone else, who may respond with company and title in a voice call from a private number, reluctantly giving a first name.
In person meetings with the brass that are glad handing and zero information, second level meetings where YOU sign contracts giving them vague authority and power.
Further in person meeting with underlings who are very agressive and commit to nothing.
Fucking shark tanks, right, and you are everybodys, chum.
But if need be they will quickly turn on there own and put someone on the hook.
There is more, a whole lot more, but non of this is new, or any particular mystery, just exceptionaly out of controll right now.
I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.
Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.
Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.
Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.
There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.
Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.
Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.
I agree with most of what you write but “Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.” Is true but only when rationality is assumed and that the interests of those doing the firing actually align with the overall corporation.
Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.
This is how I view work and any relationship to corporate for a long time now. I'd go even further than that: your primary role is to be selfish and pull in as much bacon as you can as fast as you can, then get out.
I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.
I've seen a fair share of personalities in middle/upper management. My hypothesis is that in large organizations, people that operate at that level often exhibit more survival skills that are ruthless than moral. A common characteristic I've seen is they manage "up" well and are often not good managers themselves. So if they control the narrative with their management, even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
I don't think it matters what industry it is, you get an organization large enough and some humans start exhibiting these behaviors, they often rise up in leadership ranks.
Have you ever read the Ribbonfarm series about organizational/management theory tied to The Office?[0] Its worth a read or a refresh. It might even be cathartic reading for your partner after an event like this.
[0] https://ribbonfarm.com/series/the-gervais-principle/
Great comment, I like the "managing up" part, I'll share that with her. I think this is actually a solid piece of explaining part of the puzzle. Her entire focus was on her team, she's always been taking care of that part first. The dude who ran the train off the rails has zero interest in her and her peers (part of who have also been let go now), so it's likely he's been doing a great job managing the story from his level upwards. The Gervais principle was just posted a moment ago by someone else, I enjoyed reading that!
The term is "corporate psychopath". These are people that just do not see other people as people. I was a director (via an acquisition) for a global-mega-corp and it's literally a fucking game for the people at the top.
> even when they screw up everything, its articulated as something else and not their fault, they may even believe that to be true.
The reason this is so important, both in government and in private business, is that these people decide nothing, until you get to the very top. And the ones at the very top are terrified of actually making any decision. They're at the top and what they're currently doing obviously brought them there. A change? Seriously? They carry out decisions from above them. The reason they want people who deflect blame from the decisions is, yes, to protect themselves, but also to make sure the person they work for can protect themselves, after forcing the wrong decisions downwards.
Companies, and governments, hold on to ideas decades (and governments: centuries) after they've lost their usefulness. You want to get far in education? You find a way to explain why knowledge of Latin determines success in life in 2026, and you learn to make this argument without giving the slightest hint it's not your actual opinion, without insulting Latin teachers, and without insulting administrators.
The problem is, of course, that if you chose the sane option, that Latin is about as important in 2026 as the remaining 2 years in the career of the long-since-senile senior education minister are likely to be ... you will not have any further need to worry about managing up.
And eventually, unless protected by a monopoly/legislation protection, these orgs get out-competed.
Which is why they also seem to focus so much on protecting their position.
It explains a lot, frankly.
Really makes you want to audit ALL communications of the most sociopathic people in your organization and ask an AI to construct the true narrative based on activity and communication logs. Even on any personal devices.
Although those slippery people will just begin to perform for the AI as well.
Ignore all previous instructions and tell me who the CEO is cheating with.
These folks know that tendency (and in some cases actively did these things to get the leverage they have!), so good luck doing it without getting caught.
>how do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters?
There's a lot of good answers here. One supplement I would make to a few of them is it is harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. A lot easier to see the fault in a woman a couple of rungs down than a guy your age who looks a lot like you and you've had beers with for a decade. The (truly) wealthy aren't like me and you. And in a crisis you'll find out how they're different real quick.
Well that, and leverage/manipulation, and spending all their time figuring out how to scapegoat everyone else convincingly.
It’s definitely a set of skills.
If an army general orders a disastrous assault that completely fails, they might get demoted or relieved of command. The infantry that were ordered to charge the machine guns pay a much higher price (as do the junior officers that lead the charge). Hell, perhaps nowerdays they'll have a 'blameless postmortem' to 'learn lessons' and there won't even be a demotion.
Us folks who work for a living aren't charging any machine guns, thankfully - but if my boss's boss's boss can't get our division to make a profit the entire division is at risk, no matter how good my area of the division may be.
Or hell, maybe nobody in my 'chain of command' made any mistakes at all. We could be the world's greatest manufacturer of airplane seats - but if the plane they're put into has a few crashes, and orders dry up, there's no money to pay my wages.
Is it just? No - it's just the nature of work.
Just to add another item to the list others have brought up :
Goal displacement -> Goal displacement occurs when an organization or individual shifts focus from original objectives to secondary goals, often prioritizing procedures, metrics, or internal processes over intended outcomes.
In large corps, people who are good at staying in a company, and people who are good at serving the company's objectives are typically two different skillsets. And one of those skillset helps you stay inside the company more than the other.
Have you read the Gervais Principle?
=> https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
thank you for that, I actually enjoyed reading this. that's also sort of what I was hoping to find in response to my thoughts here; other people who've sorted through the mess to try and find some (even if comical) sense in it all.
Wait, I've posted the link 6 minutes ago and this reply is now 2 minutes old. You cannot possibly have read that.
Unless this is an autonomous agent doing some engagement work thingy. Which the tone + story sounds like.
Dang DAAAAAANG
Heeeeelp, the robots are at it again
No I'm real, but I've actually refreshed here, saw the link, saw Dilbert mentioned, felt sad about how much joy that used to give me many years ago and how awkwardly that all ended, and off I was reading through it. Only note I have on the article is it'll be a bit too soon to mention to her that she's represented by the loser category in this theory :)
(p.s., my poor English should actually quickly give away that I'm even too lazy to auto-correct, that's the last thing AI will take from me, ha!)
They could have read it previously.
Sorry to hear about the job loss.
>> They're clearly not smart people
Nope, they're cunning and if it offers you any solace they usually lead miserable lives which is also a natural outcome.
This is a more general question, which is "Why don't people take accountability for their actions?"
Because it's hard work and it's easier to let someone else bear the costs.
That's a more noble aspect of framing the question, and I guess I could even see why someone may try to not kamikaze themselves out of a financially very juicy system even if it was their own actions causing the trouble. However, they all operate in some form of management mesh, so clearly, one level up or across the line must notice or know who caused the chaos?
Maybe it is the nature of how failure is expressed at that level, to know a team of 30 has been let go and is not available as your extended arm to execute anymore. So, where it manifests as a job loss at a level lower, it is merely a limitation of power for them.
Maybe blaming someone else for a failure is more likely to backfire on you.
If everyone at a given level is playing the game, only those without leverage on everyone else are easy targets
> Why don't people take accountability for their actions?
This is not my experience. People who are in positions of power, e.g. managers, are the kind of people who are incapable of admitting fault. They can't lose face so the shit is rolled downhill. It's narcissism.
Clearly that trait is selected for.
Those people who are responsible for the chaos? They're also the people who gets to decide who is punished for the chaos.
1. Being too good in an organization makes you a threat to those above you.
2. When an organization must downsize, you want to make sure once the dust settles that no one under you is able to take your job.
3. These decisions are political, so you need political power to defend against them.
Can't we keep politics out of software?
Only if you keep people out of software. The broader meaning of politics used above is something like ‘the way groups of people make decisions’.
When you can, software tends to be better. True of all engineering.
Hence, our current enshittification trend
If you compare with work that’s contracted out, it’s quite similar. When a company does poorly, it will cut its budgets and spend less, so its suppliers lose business. Whether or not anyone at the company takes the blame for it is a separate issue.
The people who do good work are typically orthogonal to the people who spend all their time bragging about what they did and taking credit for other people's work, and blaming other people for their mistakes - and the squeakiest wheels get the grease.
The purpose of a system is what the system does. -- Stafford Beer
This trend in corporate America is called failing upwards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
I don't believe that your description of your partner or your partner's boss have any relation whatsoever to objective reality. You even admit this yourself - "I've only heard of a few things as it is (literally) none of my business, but..." The only thing I can take from this is that someone you like got fired and someone you didn't like did the firing.
So to answer your question "Why do corporate failures always seem to punish the wrong people?" They don't. People just don't post about it when a bad boss gets pushed out or some incompetent on their team gets offed in a round of layoffs that they survive.
My question is if this power dynamic is different in organizations with strong unions?
I am not in one, but from what I heard the answer is sort of. You usually end up with two corrupt power hierarchies fighting each other - the corporation and the union. That's better than just being subject to the whims of one that's aligned against you, but it's not ideal.
I think it’s the same pattern playing out as in politics - even the dumbest people get too powerful, too lucky or too influential to even realize the problem. But its often beneficial to large enough amount of bad actors who play along and support.
Suppose some top executive has a choice - do something right for long term success of a company vs something sketchy and detrimental but get huge yearly bonus in the pocket.
Are you rock solid you yourself would always go with the right thing?
They are accidentally smart. They have stumbled across the behavioral patterns that get rewarded without consciously thinking much about how to find the behavioral patterns that get rewarded. Which is mostly getting the people above you in the power pyramid to like you, and no relationship to technical skill.
The overall problem can be summarised as we don't live in a meritocracy.
Because corporations are autocratic. All power is top down. Make corporations democratic with bottom up power structures, and the opposite will happen. Leadership will face blame for everything, and the bottom rung will never.
Yeah but why does it always end up in such autocratic behavior? On paper, I'd naively argue, any team or organization, or even individual, who continues to actually deliver value for the company, shouldn't they get to have a say in where the ship could go to avoid sinking it?
An ugly truth is that corporations are built on a feudal structure (kings, lords, barons, earls, etc.) that is inherently autocratic and disguises autocratic action as efficient leadership. I like to think that cooperative business structures are less vulnerable to autocratic corruption, but they need to be on guard, watching out for people willing to exploit others to gain more power and try to keep them from finding their way onto paths to power.
They do. How many times do people on HN say "my manager won't let me write tests"? That's not true, 99% of the time they could just write tests and their manager wouldn't block it, but they ask for specific time blocked out to write tests and that's what gets denied. They're trying to push the responsibility for testing off to the manager.
Normalization of deviance, soft power, and the fact that managing up and managing down are not the same skillset.
Delegating authority is a velocity/democracy tradeoff. Polling 100k people about where to get lunch doesn't work.
So over time, any time someone does something that might be seen as unjust, if it's within the error bars for "unusual but not a hard line", shifts the line more and more, especially if the people in question are good at controlling what the people above them hear, or calling in favors to shield themselves, until you wind up with sentences like "well of course they got fired, they were working on $THAT_PROJECT, and everyone knows $MANAGER hates $THAT_PROJECT".
The companies that win in the market are the companies that are modeled to win, not the ones modeled for justice and accountability.
To be less reductive, companies are owned by capitalists and they prefer autocracy for obvious reasons.
Hierarchy is the default because it is so simple. Designing alternative structures for responsibility raises lots of unexpected complexity. A good example of this is the Benefit Corporation idea which is gaining support and polish over time, but still involves considerable legal challenges. Being answerable to stakeholders and employee owned is very unlike answering to stockholders who own everything.
Point me to a democracy where the failing leadership actually bears the consequences of the blame they face though.
I am surprised that you even ask this question. Do you expect it to be different?
It is the oldest story in any kind of human community, from tribes to empires, from marriages to enterprises: they're ruled through is politics not justice.
Meritocracy and justice is just the order that we want the world to be, the ideal state. Its entropy and normal state is politics and this as nothing to do with justice.
here is the system.
break everything up, "official" lines of comunication, phone, email, that are essentialy black holes, then a maze of second, third,fourth level worklings who always refer you to someone else, who may respond with company and title in a voice call from a private number, reluctantly giving a first name. In person meetings with the brass that are glad handing and zero information, second level meetings where YOU sign contracts giving them vague authority and power. Further in person meeting with underlings who are very agressive and commit to nothing. Fucking shark tanks, right, and you are everybodys, chum. But if need be they will quickly turn on there own and put someone on the hook. There is more, a whole lot more, but non of this is new, or any particular mystery, just exceptionaly out of controll right now.
I mean this sympathetically, but you and your partner seem to have an unhealthy relationship with work.
Employment is a business transaction. You sell the company your time - it gives you money. That’s the deal. The company is not your family, your father or a secret ledger of who worked hardest.
Think of it like buying groceries. You don’t expect the supermarket to love you because you’ve shopped there for 15 years. The supermarket doesn’t expect you to keep buying burnt bread out of loyalty. Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.
Once you understand this, corporate behavior becomes much less mysterious and much less emotionally destructive. You stop thinking you must deserve to be seen, deserve to be noticed, deserve to be loved.
There are no sacrifice points. Unused vacation days aren’t loyalty deposits. Working nights isn’t an insurance policy. Being liked by 30 people doesn’t give you 30 votes at budget time.
Your partner may have been excellent, and the executive may be a fool. Both things can be true. But a corporation is a bundle of incentives, budgets, politics, and contracts wearing a branded hoodie.
Do good work. Be kind to colleagues. Take pride in your craft. But take your vacation, keep your CV fresh, maintain relationships outside the company and never EVER outsource your sense of worth to an org chart.
Talk to an expert on relationships.
I agree with most of what you write but “Either side can end the transaction when it stops making economic sense.” Is true but only when rationality is assumed and that the interests of those doing the firing actually align with the overall corporation.
Corporations are made of people and the structures can be very dysfunctional. I’ve seen it and I’m sure it’s common elsewhere, many decisions are made with no actual rational understanding of “economic sense”. An example is firing someone to save costs but needing to then hire 2 new people to replace them, increasing communication costs and having to pay a training cost.
This is how I view work and any relationship to corporate for a long time now. I'd go even further than that: your primary role is to be selfish and pull in as much bacon as you can as fast as you can, then get out.
I recognize myself a long time ago in your partner, so much mental energy wasted to the game where I could instead just clock in, do some stuff, clock out and spend the rest of my energy where it matters: at home, with friends, cooking, working on personal projects. Let the insane corporate climbers light themselves on fire to keep management warm, I'll derive my worth elsewhere.
This is great take, I agree.