Basically there are people who are willing to drag your organizations failure to build a reasonable system into the future to keep you business.
I suppose you probably do want a team like that if you're the owner.
He also writes about teams that reward and entrench tribal knowledge but have no notion of designing systems (when possible) such that even new hires cannot misuse them. http://www.daedtech.com/tribal-knowledge/
I'm sure it is these notions that the author had in mind when writing this article, and not just people who want to skirt unpleasant/difficult tasks.
The part I quoted from defines merit as raw talent or something like that, not by how useful or responsible you are. He assumes that your motivation have to drop over time and if it does not, he assumes you are bad developer. That is wrong. The productivity/motivation drop itself is a fault, not a virtue. Yes, good leadership deals with it too, but if they don't need to babysit you that way they might value that alone.
It is not just skirting unpleasant tasks. Some positions are largely repetitive - if you can not deal with that you are not suitable, period. I am unsuitable for them too, but I am quite happy that I have colleagues who are suitable. It is not actually that easy to find people who will reliably do boring work. Some positions require you do deal with problems nobody managed to optimize or difficult customers or such. Again, if you can not deal with that you are not suitable and if you can, that such ability is pure merit. Quite a lot of "hackers" run away from difficult tasks that require you to understand abstractions and such - I am good at those. As much as those "hackers" can assume me to be less capable because I did not flocked to cool new language, I still have skill they don't have.
Knowing what you are suitable for is important, but as I said, all the resentment and condescension towards people who are valued for their actual contributions is absurd.
Rather, his point is that people who go _out of their way_ to hoard knowledge on ancient systems and make themselves critical are people you want to avoid. As a single point of anecdata, the best engineers I know want to democratize information - they hate tribal knowledge because it creates a point of failure and bottleneck in the Keeper of the Tribal Knowledge.
Going out your way to learn about systems that needs to be maintained is a good thing (if that is hoarding). I want team full of people who are like that.
> On the other hand, the unskilled tend to have a slightly different curve: Value Convergence. They eventually settle into a position of mediocrity and stay there indefinitely. The only reason their value does not decrease is because the vast amount of institutional knowledge they hoard and create.
The quote you're addressing (from another article) is also qualified in the original source, under "Responses to comments" / "Not everyone ‘left behind’ is incompetent": http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...
So basically, they are people willing to do work that is needed and doing it responsibly. The work you are not willing to do and doing it without throwing temper tantrum over being too good for the work. That is why they ended up having responsibility - leadership does not have to worry that boring but needed work wont be done. He does not even have to motivate them, they just work.
I mean, I get that it is possible to asleep and not to continue learning, becoming mediocre. But if you are too good for work on critical system that needs to be done, then you have less merit then them. Merit should not be about coolness points, but about how useful you are. I agree that all this probably means leaving is a good idea for you, but the resentment towards people responsibly doing important work you are not willing to do is absurd.
Also, once you have to maintain the code for longer (or worked on old codebase), you might find that your opinions about what is clean code and what is important change - some of the stupid things if you people used to small projects routinely do are actually things that allow you not to loose sanity and control on big projects.