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.
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.