When the next round of layoffs come Alice is the least needed, so unless she is good at making sure everyone knows she gets the best solutions, she's likely to get canned.
Then when they apply at the new job at the local starup Alice is surely going to fail the first round programming quiz.
You are making the fallacious assumption that this is the one and only thing that Alice has ever done, because it's the one thing that we've talked about, and it is therefore the one thing under the metaphorical lamp post that you're thinking about.
If this is a pattern that recurs over weeks, months, and years, the delta in results between Alice and even Bob, let alone Clyde, only opens wider. Alice will surely have other opportunities to do "real programming". Granted, the way Alice is doing it may not be immediately impressive on its own but if it has someone else to compare against it becomes more evident.
I can say I've seen the Clyde solution before, but cpdean's story is rather optimistic. In the real world, the Clyde solution actually delivers late, is usually badly bodged together under the hood due to the too-late recognition of the impending deadline, and will actually create an ongoing maintenance nightmare as his code will be buggy and yet not perform very well no matter how much he bangs on it. In the real world, this sometimes gets combined with a bad manager who sees Clyde engaging in heroics and thinks Clyde is dedicated and stuff, but this is far from a sure thing. That's a very specific kind of bad manager and Clyde would be well advised not to count on having that exact kind of manager. (Heck, I've been Clyde. Very educational. Terrible use of resources.)
That's an awfully pessimistic view, and assumes that she is the only one that sees the value in this situation. Also, nowhere was the assertion made that Alice was not a competent programmer that couldn't pass a test, merely that she used her time more wisely in this situation.
Why does everyone assume that Alice just sat on her ass the whole time? That she doesn't know how to program just because she knew she had better things to do than bring yet another half-assed CMS into the world?
When the next round of layoffs come Alice is the least needed, so unless she is good at making sure everyone knows she gets the best solutions, she's likely to get canned.
Then when they apply at the new job at the local starup Alice is surely going to fail the first round programming quiz.