It seems like a very biased review to me. You can succeed with a huge variation of inputs, including treating developers as code monkeys. This startup might go nowhere, or it might do okay. The guy who was fired from Techcrunch might do better this time. Maybe the execs are also getting paid peanuts until they can afford not to.

At Google it's all about the coders but Apple is mostly about design and they're a 'technology' company. Apple essentially 'outsourced' a huge pillar of their core to FreeBSD and it succeeded hugely. I'm not convinced Larry Ellison thinks programmers are the precious jewels of his company, but he's done okay.