Where I’d work besides Big Tech — and what “a business without programmers” actually means now

I have had the Big Tech offer and I have had the week where I almost took it because the dental plan was a novel. I did not take it. That is not a purity story. It is a preference about what I want my calendar to mean, and a bet about where software still needs a person who can be wrong in production.

The phrase I keep hearing in 2026 is “a business without programmers.” Founders say it on podcasts. Operators say it after a weekend with Cursor and a Stripe account. Recruiters say it to justify a hiring freeze. The phrase is doing too much work. Some of those businesses are real. Some of them are a demo with an invoice. The difference is where I would still take a job.

What I am opting out of

I am not allergic to scale. I am allergic to a year of work that cannot be pointed at. At a large platform org I have watched competent people spend two quarters aligning a migration that a smaller company would have done in a pull request and a maintenance window. The compensation is the apology. For some people it is a fair apology. For me the apology stopped covering the boredom.

I also do not romanticize “scrappy.” Unpaid overtime plus a founder who treats Slack as a page is not a philosophy. It is a cash problem. I have done that job. I will not do it again for equity that is a PDF and a vibe.

So the filter is narrower than “not FAANG.” I want a place where a staff-shaped engineer can still change the shape of the product, where the on-call is real but finite, and where “we do not hire programmers” is either false or honestly scoped.

The shops I would join

A vertical SaaS that already has customers and a boring stack. Insurance admin. Clinic scheduling. Freight auditing. The UI is ugly. The domain is sharp. They run Postgres, a modest Kubernetes cluster or even ECS, and a couple of workers. They need someone who can say no to a fourth micro-service. I have been happiest here. The work is specific. The users have names. The pager, when it fires, is about money or appointments, not about a metric that exists to justify a promo packet.

An industrial or regulated company that finally admitted software is the product. A lab instruments firm. A regional bank’s new payments rail. A logistics company that stopped pretending the IBM i box would last forever. They will pay you to be the adult. They will also try to make you a department of one. I would take it with a written support plan — a second hire, or a contractor budget — and I would walk if the plan is “you plus ChatGPT.”

A public-interest or infrastructure-adjacent org that ships. Not a slide deck about smart cities. A team that runs something: a transit data pipeline, a benefits eligibility API, a hospital integration. The politics are worse. The meaning is better. I would read the last six months of Git history before I believed the mission page.

A productized consultancy or a small ISV. Ten to forty people, a product they own, clients they can name. The failure mode is becoming a body shop that slaps your name on staff aug. I ask what percentage of revenue is the product versus hours. If they cannot say, I already know.

What “a business without programmers” actually is

I have now sat with a dozen operators who claim they do not need an engineering team. After the demo, the stories sort into four piles.

1. A business that bought a programmer in pieces

Shopify plus Zapier plus a Webflow site plus a freelancer who shows up when the theme breaks. That is not zero programmers. That is programmers on a meter, plus a founder who is the integration. It works until a tax rule changes or a marketplace API deprecates a field. I would not join this as an employee. I might invoice them for a week to put the Zapier chaos into a small TypeScript worker and a runbook. Then I would leave before I became the on-call for a store.

2. A business whose product is someone else’s platform

A Notion shop. An Airtable shop. A Salesforce-only shop. The “programmers” are admins and a bit of Apex or a Scriptable. This can be a real company. The ceiling is the platform’s permission model and the day the vendor sunsets the feature you sold. I would work there if they admitted they are a Salesforce practice, not a software company. I would not work there if they wanted me to “build a moat” on rented schema.

3. A business that used agents to skip the first hire

This is the 2026 flavor. A founder pair-codes with Claude or Cursor, ships a Next.js + Supabase app, and has paying users. I respect the hustle. I have used the same tools to scaffold a weekend spike. What they do not have is: migrations they trust, an auth story that survives a confused user, backups, a second brain when the founder has the flu. “Without programmers” here means “the first programmer has not been hired yet.” I would join as that hire if the revenue is real and they want me to make the system boring. I would not join if they want me to keep vibe-coding features while production data lives in a single Supabase project with no replica and a founder-owned GitHub.

4. A business that truly does not have software risk

A bakery with a Square terminal. A trades crew with Jobber. A clinic that is fine with the EHR they were given. They should not hire me. I should not try to turn them into a platform. The industry’s habit of inventing a software company inside a real company is how you get a graveyard of internal tools. If I wanted to work adjacent to them, I would work at the vendor they already pay.

Where I would not go, even if it is “not Big Tech”

A crypto-adjacent shop that has renamed itself AI. A marketplace that is still “figuring out unit economics” in year five. A place whose engineering blog is all culture and no systems. A startup that wants a staff engineer and has no product manager, no designer, and a CEO who will be the third reviewer on every PR.

I also would not go back to a “platform team of one” that exists to serve twelve product teams who do not report to anyone who can say no. That job feels senior. It is a shock absorber. I have been the shock absorber. My back still remembers.

Agencies that sell “we will stand up your AI strategy” are a 2026 magnet. Some are honest integrators. Many are slide companies. I ask for the last production system they still operate, not the last workshop they ran. If they do not operate anything, I am not an engineer there. I am a prop.

How I interview them

I ask for the last Sev2 and who was on the call. I ask how many production databases they have and which one is the source of money. I ask whether they have a staging environment that is not a lie. I ask what they will stop doing if they hire me — if the answer is “nothing, we will just go faster,” they want a hero, not a lead.

I ask the founder what “without programmers” meant in their last interview. If they laugh and say “we meant we do not want a 40-person org,” we can talk. If they say “the model writes the code now,” I ask who owns the pager. Someone always owns the pager. If they say nobody pages because nothing is that critical, I ask what happens when Stripe webhooks fail on a Sunday. The answer tells me whether they have a business or a prototype with invoices.

Compensation: I want cash that matches the responsibility. I will take some equity in a company with revenue I can see. I will not take a discount to participate in a story about agents replacing the team I am about to be.

The work I want in those places

I want to shrink systems, not grow them. Delete a service. Move a workflow from a brittle Zapier path into a worker with retries we can see in Honeycomb or Grafana. Put the backups on a restore drill. Teach one other person the settlement path so I can take a vacation.

That is lead work in a small org. It is not glamorous. It is the opposite of a business without programmers. It is a business that finally hired the programmer they were renting from five vendors, and then asked them to become optional in a healthy way — through docs, through a second hire, through less software.

The healthiest “no programmers” companies I have seen are the ones that bought a finished product and refused to customize it. The unhealthiest are the ones that generated a unique system in a month and called the absence of a team a strategy.

What I tell people who are stuck in the default path

Big Tech is a valid job. It is a particular kind of valid: compensation, brand, a chance to specialize until you forget how a request reaches a database. If that is the season you are in, take it. I am not recruiting you out of a good life.

If you are leaving because you want to see the shape of a product again, look at the four shops I named. Ignore the podcast that says programmers are over. Look at Git history, revenue, and the pager. Take the job where software still has consequences and the company knows it.

A business without programmers, in the honest sense, is a business whose software risk lives in a vendor contract. A business without programmers, in the slide sense, is a business that has not had its first real outage. I will work at the first kind only as a customer. I will work at the second kind only if they are ready to stop using the phrase.

Everyone else — the vertical SaaS, the regulated adult, the small ISV — still needs people who can be wrong in production and stay to clean it up. That is the job I want. It was never on a campus map. It is still the job.