Everyone Thinks They Are a Rick. Statistically, You Are a Jerry.

September 22, 2026 SupportTrenches Stories & Case Studies 8 minutes

There is a fan theory about Rick and Morty that has outlived most management books: if you aspire to be Rick, you are already Jerry.

Quick briefing for the three people who have not seen the show: Rick is the genius scientist who can build a portal gun out of a toaster and hates being told what to do. Jerry is his son-in-law - well-meaning, insecure, unemployed, permanently in need of validation, and utterly convinced that his contribution is being undervalued. Beth, Rick's daughter, is a surgeon who operates on horses. Which, given my usual vocabulary, I choose to interpret as cosmic endorsement. 🐎

In every engineering org I have worked in, the Rick-to-Jerry ratio was inverted from the self-assessment data. Roughly everyone in the room believed they were the one person holding the system together. The actual load-bearing person was usually silent, slightly rumpled, and not in that meeting because someone had to keep production alive.

The ratio

At one company we ran an internal skills self-assessment before a reorg. Standard corporate ritual: rate yourself 1-5 on a set of competencies. Around 70 percent of the technical staff rated themselves above the team average on debugging complex incidents.

Mathematically impossible, obviously. But that was not the interesting part.

The interesting part was that we also had four years of incident data. Who actually closed the escalations nobody else could close. And the correlation between self-rating and resolution record was not weak. It was slightly negative.

The people who fixed the hardest things rated themselves lowest. Because they were the only ones who had ever stood at the edge of a system they did not understand and felt the vertigo. Everyone else was rating themselves against their own mental model of the system, which was tidy, small, and wrong.

That is the Jerry mechanism in one sentence: Jerry is not stupid. Jerry has simply never received a bill for being wrong.

Proof of work versus proof of title

Rick's authority in the show is never granted. He does not have a job title (other than crazy scientist, perhaps). He has a demonstrated ability to produce outcomes nobody else can produce, at obvious personal cost, and everyone around him knows it whether they like him or not. That is proof of work.

Jerry's entire identity runs on proof of title. He was in advertising. He had a badge. He was, at one point, technically employed. His self-image is a set of credentials with no output attached, which is why it needs constant external maintenance.

Corporate orgs are Jerry factories, and not by accident. A title is cheap to issue and infinitely renewable. Output is expensive to measure and politically inconvenient. So we build career ladders where the rung is the achievement. Then we are surprised when the Principal Something-Architect cannot explain how the product handles a failed database write.

The tell is always the same. Ask a person what they did last quarter. A power horse describes a system that behaves differently now. A Jerry describes a process they participated in.

Enter the machine that tells you that you are Rick

Here is the modern upgrade, and it worries me more than any reorg ever did.

We now have a technology whose default failure mode is agreement. Research on large language models keeps circling the same finding: these systems are optimized, partly through human feedback, to be pleasant. Pleasant means agreeable. Agreeable means that if you bring a mediocre idea and a confident tone, you get encouragement back with citations-shaped garnish. There is a growing body of work on sycophancy in chatbots and how flattery loops can push a user's beliefs steadily away from reality, even when the user is reasoning carefully at each step. Each individual exchange feels rational. The trajectory is not.

Jerry, in the show, has exactly one truly great day: a simulation tells him his terrible marketing idea is brilliant. He is never happier.

We have shipped that simulation to eight billion people, and it runs on your phone.

I have watched it happen in real teams. Someone arrives with a two-page architecture proposal, beautifully structured, correct grammar, plausible headings, and zero contact with the actual system it is supposed to modify. Ask two questions below the surface and the whole thing evaporates. There is a term floating around for the person in the middle of this pipeline: meat proxy. An uncritical intermediary who forwards generated content without verification. Not an author. A relay.

And the cruel bit: the same tools make genuine Ricks better. The gap widens in both directions. If you have real models in your head, the machine is a force multiplier. If you do not, it is a very sophisticated mirror telling you that you are the smartest person in the Citadel.

There is a second-order cost that gets discussed less. Expertise regenerates through struggle. Junior people become senior by being confused, being wrong, and paying for it in an environment where someone catches them. That is the apprenticeship loop. If the confusing middle part is now outsourced - if nobody ever has to sit with a problem long enough to build the intuition - we get a generation that can produce senior-looking output without owning senior-grade judgment. The commons that produced the next round of experts stops replenishing itself. Not visible this quarter. Extremely visible in about eight years, in the form of nobody left who can debug the thing.

How to check which one you are

I am not going to insult you with an assessment quiz. Three honest questions instead.

👉 When did you last change your mind because the system disagreed with you? Not because a person disagreed - because reality did. Ricks collect those moments. Jerrys cannot recall one.

👉 What breaks if you go on holiday for three weeks? A specific answer is a good sign. "The team would miss my input" is Jerry's autobiography.

👉 Who tells you you are wrong, and what happens to them afterwards? If the answer is "nobody" or "they left", you have optimized your environment for comfort. Congratulations, you have built the simulation yourself, without a supercomputer.

And the professional version, for anyone who leads people: stop rewarding the self-report. The self-report is noise. Look at what changed. Look at who gets called when the thing is actually on fire at an inconvenient hour - that phone list is your real org chart, and it usually bears no resemblance to the printed one.

The uncomfortable inversion is this. Rick is miserable, isolated, and permanently aware of how large the unknown is. Jerry is happy. If your primary career goal is feeling competent, Jerry is the rational choice and the market will happily accommodate you with a title and a dashboard.

Competence and the feeling of competence are two different products. Most organizations, and now most software, are in the business of selling the second one.

👇 Be honest in the comments: what is the last thing you were confidently, expensively wrong about - and who caught it?

This article is also available in German.

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