The level a programmer works at (say, Emacs) is too abstract to support a business. Developers working at the developer abstraction layer need an implementation layer — an organization that takes their code and turns it into products. Dolly Parton, working at the “singing a nice song” layer, needs a huge implementation layer too, to make the records and book the concert halls and take the tickets and set up the audio gear and promote the records and collect the royalties.

Any successful software company is going to consist of a thin layer of developers, creating software, spread across the top of a big abstract administrative organization.

The abstraction exists solely to create the illusion that the daily activities of a programmer (design and writing code, checking in code, debugging, etc.) are all that it takes to create software products and bring them to market. Which gets me to the most important point of this essay: Your first priority as the manager of a software team is building the development abstraction layer.