Such a sad writeup.

Having a journalist glorify some 10x gurus in a specific team and diss every other software developer in the world is not going to solve the problem at all.

It's a shame though - because the topic is a really important and interesting one, which deserves discussion. But not this type of dramatisation.

The most important sentence only comes at the end (and is the reason you can't trust the solutions proposed):

> And money is not the critical constraint: the groups $35 million per year budget is a trivial slice of the NASA pie, but on a dollars-per-line basis, it makes the group among the nation’s most expensive software organizations.

You work with the constraints you have. Eliminating the constraint doesn't solve the problem - it redefines it.