Also, that Business Insider article is an inadvertent IQ test for people who want to regurgitate their figures. That $1.8 million number is revenue/#employees and not profit/#employees. Using profit calculation of $53B/98k is ~$500k. Since, a fully-loaded FTE in Silicon Valley is ~$250k, the ~$500k doesn't look that insane.

If a writer copy&pastes stuff like that into their own essay without critical thought, don't be surprised if it taints the rest of his essay. For example, the "you are not a commodity" is not fully reasoned out. In the essay, it's just an empty platitude/affirmation instead of explaining why some programmers are treated as commodities and how to differentiate themselves to avoid that categorization.