Otherwise? Totally agree. The worst developers are the ones that make everything they touch that much worse merely by virtue of touching it. I’ll take dead weight, “go write a bunch of printf’s and accomplish nothing” over them any day.
They're most likely talking about Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). The amount is completely unrelated to the severity of a person's disability.
The reason is in the name--it's insurance for lost wages. Workers' FICA taxes are the premiums they pay while working, and are based on wages as well. So basically: the more one makes while working, means the more they pay in while working, means the more they lose when disabled, which means the more they get paid by SSDI.
So to my point, this isn’t a story about a bad programmer, it’s a story about a person who is truly so disabled that they can’t program.
This is all to say that they have my sympathy... but also to kind of disagree with their premise. Truthfully, the "best" bad programmers never get so far as imploding. They simply manage to sabotage everything they touch while being none the wiser. They smoothly redirect blame whenever it comes their way without even consciously thinking about it, because they truthfully believe that they are in the clear.