Computer Science mixed with human factors looks similar to psychology in the early 20th century (we clearly have mommy problems). The statement "there are only 2 hard problems" is cute and pithy but doesn't really match my experience over the last 15 years.
Most of my painful memories relate to: multi-threading, timezones (bloody timezones), migration a system from A to B tech (i.e. SQL to NoSQL), ensuring a distributed system does something once--and only once, refactoring a god object, delegating a problem to an uneven strength team, building a system where the team organization doesn't match the desired architecture, getting the right requirements, dependency management, and deployment. There are probably more but that's beside the point.
There is research to support some of my observations but it's hidden behind paywalls or has thin supporting evidence. Comprehensive studies are hard and a lot of the research uses only students as convenience subjects. There really isn't a strong connection between the research community and practice in order to provide the right measurements.
What I would like to see is adding support to GitHub for community research studies. There is wealth of pure code observations. It would be interesting to allow integration of survey tools and marry that to the code observations. It'll answer some of the problems but not others (i.e. the pain of maintaining a live service). And finally as part of the GitHub EULA this research must be publicly available.
I agree 100%, beyond that my current contract strictly prohibits this kind of work. One of the premises of the article is that the restrictions on location undermines the goal of hiring the best. Given his hiring requirements I couldn't even look at his company--it might as well be on the moon let alone the valley.