I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. Rock bands are scalable careers. They don't get paid a wage, and the income between the top performers and the mass of wannabes is huge. Being physically present is not a necessary nor sufficient condition for non-scalability. To serve a marginal customer, rock bands essentially don't have to do anything, but doctors need to put in time for the new patient.

How about computers, then? Working as a software engineering employee or contractor is not a scalable profession: you get paid for your time, and your time is limited. However, working as a micro-ISV or startup founder is scalable: you get paid for selling a product, and it costs you nothing to produce additional copies of that product.

I think the grandparent's point is that some careers have multiple business models, some of which are scalable and some of which are not. So scalability is not a property of the career, but rather of a particular revenue stream. Heck, many firms do both, like his example of a rock band, or like the software company that both sells a product and then makes money supporting that product (eg. RedHat, 37signals, and Fog Creek).

Thanks. Now I think I understand. I guess it would be the difference between, say, a session musician or your average member in an orchestra versus a rock band trying to make it big.

However, if you focus on how you get paid rather than the cost of marginal increase in the big-picture sense, are there any purely scalable careers? Every scalable job has parts where you need to be present, from writing books to writing code. Clearly skills like writing well and proficiency in coding can work for most multiple jobs; you can just as easily be a journalist instead of nonfiction writer, for example.

Regardless, it feels great to be able to code. It's something I love to do, and can take different forms with every job. Sometimes, life is just good.

If you wanna put it in economics terms, it's basically the difference between fixed costs and variable costs. Scalable professions have high fixed costs and low (or no) variable costs. So it may take you 10 years to learn how to program well and 3 years to write a killer application, but then once you've done that, you can sell as many copies as people will buy for zero cost. Naturally, this is high risk & high reward: many people give up before they've built a product that other people will buy.

It gets a little complicated because in a profession that's innately scalable (like computers, writing, or any sort of IP), the distinction between scalable and unscalable business models usually comes down to who's bearing the risk. So, if you're an entrepreneur, you front all of the fixed costs of developing the product yourself (or you get investors to do it in exchange for equity). In return, you get all the rewards if it's successful. However, if you're an employee, you sell your labor for a fixed price (= unscalable, since you have only a fixed amount of time), and then the company bears the risk of the product not succeeding in the market.

Personally, I think you should think of an employer as an insurance company: they underwrite the risk that your venture will fail in the marketplace, in exchange for taking the vast majority of the rewards if it succeeds. Whether or not this is a good tradeoff depends a lot on things like external economic circumstances, your skill level, ideas you have for new markets, etc.

Much better put than my post.

There's some resonance between the scalable & non-scalable revenue streams. The details of what one does in the non-scalable portion can be massively amplified in the scalable portion.

It's as if, for some combination of business models, the quality of the non-scalable aspect becomes the exponent for the scalable aspect:

r = s^(nt)

revenue = scalable to the power of the non-scalable * time

Versus a pure non-scalable play, like straight consulting:

r = nt