The terms lazy and hard-working are used loosely here. I definitely would hire a smart programmer that's not afraid of doing things the 'hard' way when the constraints of the project demand it, but a programmer that too easily falls into doing it the hard-way may not be considering alternatives that are more maintainable long-term, and I've seen enough people get burned out by marathons of working the hard way that some surveys of the technology and pilot projects before jumping in (or just having an experienced specialist on-board) would have saved lives and careers.
The point of this article is that some people are lazy in a different way. They aren't lazy because they aren't challenged. They just appear to be lazy because their hands aren't at the keyboard. They're actually the opposite of lazy because they are tackling the additional challenges of evaluating all of the possibilities and trying to find the most expressive and easiest maintained implementation.
Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for a quick and dirty hack session, and sometimes you just need to hard-code the stuff to get the first version out the door, but if you have the luxury of making it right the first time, go for it. Just don't forget to counter-point, "Perfect is the enemy of good".
But, aren't they little hard to come by?
People are lazy because they are not challenged by the things around them.