Sure, but "becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants" does not imply putting out fires nor bad design. Not by a long stretch. But then again, if the company has that badly written critical system, someone willing to work on it responsibly has more merit then someone who is not willing to work on it. Of course if you are able to do it better and make needed changes then it is even better, but prerequisity is you being willing to work and assume responsibility.

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.

I don't believe the author is looking down on people who work on boring, critical systems.

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.

There was not a single mention of refusal to share information nor refusal to document. Just that they assume responsibilities others don't want do and that they work on critical systems.

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.

The original post specifically calls out hoarding:

> 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...