Also true, though it tends to be difficult to pin down what "business experience" means.
What I am confident about is that there's no such thing
as "business experience". Running a small business,
founding a new start-up, and being CEO of a major
corporation like Sprint are quite different
propositions, requiring different skill sets, and
calling for different decisions. Managing a gigantic
organization of thousands of employees in a
multi-billion dollar transnational is simply not at
all like bootstrapping a small venture with one or
two underpaid partners and a shoestring budget.
-- Zachary Ernst, Why I Jumped Off The Ivory Tower [1]
Suppose one had the ideal academic manager, fully cognizant of the specializations within the industry, with a 100% grant proposal acceptance rate, available when needed, incapable of assigning the wrong people to the wrong project, never overpromises funding agencies solutions to open problems in computer science, and so on. The opportunity for academic advancement for a scientific programmer will still depend on publications, and in the case of a scientific programmer, that would include publications about the software one has written.
To your last point, there's definitely no shortage of venues to publish and present when it comes to scientific software and development methodologies.
In my experience established PIs tend to delegate a healthy fraction of the responsibility for managing technical staff, mentoring students, and even acquiring funding to their postdocs. In turn, faculty search committees see this experience as crucial, and competition for academic jobs is strong enough (~100 applicants per position, last I heard) that I would imagine any new PI should have a fair amount of experience under their belt.
At the PhD level and above, academia seems to revolve around managing one's personal brand. Publishing a few good papers isn't enough, you have to be "THE guy/girl" in an in-demand specialty to get a job. Your observation that this requires a business/PR/advertising mentality in addition to the ability to do solid research is spot on, but I think the game changes long before professor-hood, and I think that anyone who successfully obtains an entry-level professorship has already demonstrated competence at playing it.
