There will always be people who develop solo or work in small teams of 2 and 3. Those are the people who tackle much smaller software problems for far smaller clients.

Solo developers are most certainly not super heroes. That’s exactly why they develop small software, making small money. Teams of 2 or 3 developers are in a similar boat. They were never super heroes, they aren’t super heroes and will never be super heroes. They have a market to serve and they will serve that market.

Of course, most people out of University end up working for massive companies in huge teams. Some people love working in huge teams, others prefer smaller ones.

There will always be those (like me) who don’t mind working solo, and absolutely love to work in small teams or 3 to 6 people — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

A cowboy is someone who is arrogant enough to try build something Microsoft Word on their own. Yes, there are people who try that. But most lone developer or small teams would never do that.

In fact, if you look at the Ruby on Rails community, it DEPENDS on many lone developers who write small plugins, feeding into the Rails ecosystem.

Cowboys are dead, but lone developers and small teams will always have their place. It’s kind of line comparing a charter pilot to an airline pilot. Apples and oranges!

@Dick C Flatliner: Nice literary reference :) Wonder how many other folks got it.

I’m not saying that I relish a return to the days of being the one man shop but, I think you’d make a better argument by talking about the size and scale of most modern projects and not so much on technologies.

A modern developer just needs to know a lot of stuff.

For example, I would expect the ‘average’ J2EE developer to know Java, SQL, JavaScript, XML, HTML, CSS, J2EE APIs, as well as some frameworks Spring/Struts/Hibernate (for example) and some web toolkits whether YUI, GWT or what-ever.

The average developer should also be able to set-up and administer and master his dev environment, which means IDE, Server(s), and Database.

In the last 4 companies I’ve worked for, *every* single developer was able to do this. Even when there is specialization, there is always overlap. The SQL “expert” also writes Java and HTML, the ‘front-end’ guy still has to write Servlets, custom tags, data access object, web service clients, etc.

Overspecialization leads to unemployment

To write a great webapp you need 1-3 people to start with. Of course if a project gets super huge (like youtube, facebook, flickr) you need to add more people. But this is not due the fact that a programmer needs to learn all those requirements, which a lot from the article are absolutely not necessary to learn in detail. Whats the point of completely mastering something which you only need a couple of features from.

Also look which points for example ruby on rails (+plugins) covers from the list:

* Various flavors of SQL
* Multiple compiled and scripting languages
* XML configuration files
* MVC frameworks
* O/R mapping tools
* Unit testing harnesses
* Development methodologies
* Countless open source and commercial libraries, plug-ins, and extensions
* Application server installation and configuration
* HTTP and SSL
* DOM
* JavaScript
* Ajax
* Script.aculo.us, Gears, Dojo, YUI, etc.
* SOAP and REST
* RSS and Atom

Learning only this framework introduces you to a wide range of necessary knowledge for building a webapp. The rest can be attained by learning css/html and use svn/cruisecontrol.rb/mongrel/mysql etc. It’s not that much. The author seems to present it worse than it is in reality.

There are a lot of solutions available which covers multiple of those points. Also in real life you rarely need an enterprise team like described in this article to start something great. Look at youtube, digg, flickr, various google projects, roller coaster tycoon (1 man game written in 90% assembly). The main point is, that its certainly possible to hire super programmers with experience in multiple areas like mentioned in the list. And its also not necessary to hire a complete team to write the next cool thing. A small team can pull it off. In fact I believe small teams or one man products are more capable in succeeding than an enterprise team who is supposed to come up with the next cool thing.

For instance, writing a new programming language is something one person can do. Writing the fastest-yet mp4 encoder is a one person job.

These days a software product has to be very shiny. It has to have a modular plugin architecture, it has to be re-skinnable, it has to be customisable, and auto-updatable, it has to do 50 things around the edges. But none of these are unique selling points. The clever thing it does is often the small core that make customers select it over rivals. And in my experience, the small core is usually the vision, and often the implementation of a single person.

I work in medical informatics, and most of the leading edge software in the machine learning, decision support, natural language processing type fields, are basically one man outfits. In time those will of course mature and be absorbed in ‘enterprise’ applications with huge teams behind them. But don’t underestimate:

1. The large quantity of niche software out there
2. The fact that much of this niche software is basically one-coder outfits.

The problem with the cliche “jack of all trades, master of none” is that a lot of people don’t consider that there are other possibilities. What about “jack of many trades, master of one?” or “master of two, and working on three?”

One thing that helps the responsible solo developer is that not all of the team-oriented technology is really necessary. You don’t need to spend time getting a Bugzilla server up and running when MS-Access works just fine for bug tracking. Continuous integration becomes much simpler. Staff meetings are very short.

Every developer should know at least one unit testing framework, understand and use source code control, and try to keep up with the current methodology theories. Every developer writing code that accesses a database should have a grounding in how relational databases work, and know the basics of what to do and what NOT do do when using it. Every developer writing a web application should have an understanding of how HTTP works, understand what a DTD is and how it applies to html, understand CSS, Javascript, Ajax, and understand how to avoid common security problems introduced by javascript and SQL injection.

There’s still a big market out there for solo developers. Yes, you need to know more to be successful. And it’s a lot harder to get away with gaps in your knowledge than if you’re part of a team. But continuous learning is part of what being a software developer is all about.

Awesome – my first flaimbait commenter!

Aren’t you validating the guest writers opinion by saying that you know *almost* everything?

@Renji –

I do agree with you that developers that can successfully float being a cowboy developer are quick studies with technologies.

Unfortunately, there are some areas that can just not be taught in 3 days or with a book (for example, search engine marketing).

This is why I 90% agree with this guest post. There was a day where if you knew COBOL, C, and Fortran, you knew the universe of computers. Now it is fact that no one can know everything all of the time.