I don’t believe this is a meaningful distinction when we’re not going to agree on how to judge performance of software engineers. If this were solely about income, it might be an important distinction.

The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot

But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median

Median is a type of average.

Though usually "average" implies arithmetic mean.