Both the author and Forbes have it backwards: there are developers out there that are ten times >worse< than the average developer. There are also, contrary to the articles assertion, plenty of teams that are 10 or a hundred or even infinitely worse than normal. (infinite meaning they never release anything at all, ever)
No, the author doesn't have that backwards. He makes this very point: "This folklore arises, in part, because it is possible to be arbitrarily more productive than the worst." And goes into it at length in the linked piece: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=31698&...
I guess that in any kind of game you have a system to sort out the worst players. Going after your theory, there are sure plenty of 1/100000 out there, but they never get in a major development project.
Another point: there are also superstar surgeons and lawyers. I think the author wanted to point that software development is not different from other professions.
Also his cost curve may be more accurate for a devops scenario than for classic product dev. Late changes/fixes induct lots of additional management cost to the technical issues, discussions with client etc. Not to say that you can't debug on a convenient environment but have sometime to reproduce it based on logs.
