Can we create a counter-meme, "Eliminate Non-Programmers." Doesn't it seem like we're entering a world where small software and web business be run profitably by small teams of programmers?
No. There's nothing inherently special about programmers or the current crop of small software and web businesses that makes them any better at business than founders and startups in other industries except that they're still small. To scale a business still requires people with talents in marketing, sales, accounting, etc, etc.
Small businesses in almost every industry are almost always started by people with technical expertise in that industry. Whether the small business succeeds may be due to technical prowess to a degree, but whether it scales is largely due to the business savvy of the leadership, not their technical prowess.
In the same way, to the extent that small web businesses turn into large web businesses, it's due more to the leadership and business skills of the founders and management than how good they are at writing code.
I see something very special--the cost of starting a software business and the opportunity for getting it to profitability have become easier and more profitable for small teams of engineers. It's special because not all technical fields share these characteristics and it's special because it's newly prominent in web software.
I think it's fair, if we're measuring success in terms of money, to measure the success of a business by how big it gets. However, it seems completely wrong to then measure the success of individual engineers by the size of their business. Instead, you should measure their individual financial outcome.
The question that matters here is which approach maximizes the financial outcome for a programmer. Did the Trott's do the right thing for their family by taking funding for Six Apart, or could they have done more for themselves keeping it private? What about programmers that have a product idea that doesn't qualify for funding or wouldn't make good founders for a company with a traditional mix of talents? Would they do better joining such a company? Or building a company that plays to their strengths.
FWIW, my calculus on engineer-centric small business was around happiness and maximizing the time I spent building software that mattered to me.
