I voted you back up because I don't think it deserves the downvote, but here's the thing: mediocrity exists and it gets things done. For you and I who do not wish to tolerate mediocrity our only option is to find work environments that suit our tastes, but we're not going to stop the machine through our indignation.

Plus, even if a company rejects mediocrity in its DNA, a non-technical organization is most likely going to have structural issues that will drive out good programmers anyway. It's possible for a non-technical organization to learn to value and retain good programmers, but there are many factors that need to come together, and statistically I think the majority will never figure it out.

Finally, there's an amazing thing about code is that once it works, it can continue to work in the exact same fashion indefinitely as long as nothing changes. From experience we both know that it's much better to do things right so that you have a maintainable and flexible system that can grow with an organization, but that is not a strict requirement for code to generate value in the short to medium time frames that most companies operate. Just because code is completely unmaintainable, and the cost of comparably trivial maintenance becomes exorbitant, doesn't mean that it doesn't have real business value. We privileged alpha programmers have the luxury of avoiding jobs that have to deal with this, but it's out there and it's a huge proportion of production code (I'd wager it's the majority). In the grand scheme of things it's all good though, nothing lasts forever anyway. Bad code could be one more thing that hastens the demise of an atrophying company, or it could be quietly deleted and replaced by newer systems once it's outlived its usefulness.