You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force. As long as

You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force. As long as the need for labor scales roughly in line with the population and the supply of competitors scales with the population as well, then your economic prospects are equally good whether you're in the top 1% (or .0001%) of a thousand people in a field or a hundred million. You just need to make sure you're in a field where the need for labor (and the compensation's correlation with talent) scales properly with the population. A good surgeon is always going to be in a decent situation, because the demand for surgeons is exactly proportional to the number of people around; a high level competitive athlete is probably much worse off as the population grows, because the number of paying athletic competitions is mostly uncorrelated to the population (though other opportunities correlate better, like teaching gym class, being a personal trainer, etc. - music is similar, in that the number of massively profitable rock stars is mostly constant, but the more mundane opportunities, like gigs and lessons, grow in line with the population). Startups probably walk both sides of the line depending on the specific business plan, and I suspect that a lot of them do have plenty to fear from the growing pool of competent entrepreneurial programmers. One of the issues here is that the supply of programmers is probably growing a bit faster than the population; then again, so is the need for them, especially as the world shifts more and more towards the digital, so it's possible that there's still a good balance there, I'm not sure.