"industrious" does not been intelligent. "Industrious" means hard-working. No, I would not say Alan was smart, because he ended up writing a product with half the functionality, triple the amount of bugs, quintuple the amount of code, and quadruple the amount of employees. He didn't engineer the solution to minimize costs, maintenance, and simplicity while maximizing functionality. He just jumped into writing code thinking he knew best. So, to re-iterate, he's an idiot (compared to Charles).

"great hackers use their brains and write great code to solve their problems with the absolute minimum amount of work". Sorry, but I disagree. Just because, in the parable, Charles' solution ended up being the better one, that does not mean that all solutions with less code and less work are "greater" (remember, it's just a parable). Sometimes, you need extra work to make the solution more stable, more maintainable, more bug-free, etc. Great hackers recognize these situations and do the extra work and planning to come up with an elegant design when necessary.

I would never hire someone who always does the "absolute minimum amount of work", because if it's a poor solution, we'll end up doing more work later (fixing bugs, refactoring, debugging, etc.).