Your second paragraph talks about the value of your time to you and in that sense, it&#x27;s true. From the company&#x27;s point of view of your time, your second paragraph is somewhere between irrelevant and false.<p>You hit the nail on the head that we&#x27;re giving up a lot of the value &quot;pie&quot; in exchange for much lower risk. My mindset takes that one step farther: ensure that everyone&#x27;s economic goals are aligned and stably pointed to continued employment of me and my team. That requires an exchange of my time for the company&#x27;s money at a rate low enough that it&#x27;s obvious to the company they&#x27;re getting an economic gain from buying it and high enough that it&#x27;s obvious to me that I&#x27;m getting an economic gain from selling it.<p>If those ranges don&#x27;t overlap, you have a very unstable situation. When those ranges have large overlap, many different valuations of time are stable and mutually beneficial.<p><i>&gt;What if the company needed you to debug some worthless software in the chain as an emergency?</i><p>If the software I&#x27;m debugging is worthless, it&#x27;s hard to imagine there&#x27;s a genuine emergency involving it. The mere fact that there&#x27;s an emergency involving it means it has some value to someone.