While the caricature is entertaining, I have never worked in a corporation that works at all like what's described.
At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last.
At companies I've worked at, some prodigies have very high positions at 30; some maintenance steady goers may find a good pace in the middle into senior age.
A successful corporation lets every employee both contribute, and stretch.
And working with experienced people who know what they are doing is the best way to learn real skills that can't be learned from reading an open source project wiki.
At companies I've worked at, if you're checked out, you do not last.
If you get a reputation for being checked out, it gets hard for you. There are plenty of people who check out without getting a reputation, and who do just fine.
If you stop showing up for standup and you're not a top performer, you get in trouble. (You may even get in trouble if you are a top performer for "setting a bad example".) If you know how to make it look like you're a middling performer while you're actually doing very little, you can get away with it for a few years, which is long enough to figure out what you really want to do.
Checked-out-ness, I'd guess, is more often a transient state than the notion is given credit. Strategic slacking while you figure out what you really want to do, network internally to find transfer options and future leads/co-founders, and build skills that are relevant to the next job if not the current one, is a necessary career-planning skill. You may not be able to carry it on for 5 years, but no one intends to.
If you've been at a job for less than 4 years or held your current title for less than 1, it can make sense to stick around if you're checked out, for the sake of your CV. If neither applies, you're best to get out. You don't want to be a job hopper, but if you're 3-4 years in, then you don't really get more gain from a longer stay and slacking (beyond a few months to recharge) makes no sense from a career perspective; you should just move on.
Also, I've gotten into detail about this in my Gervais/MacLeod Series (starting here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/gervais-prin... ). Companies tend to oscillate between rank cultures and tough cultures. A rank culture is one where subordinacy is all that matters; don't piss off your boss, don't create the appearance of slacking (which will cause problems for your boss) and you'll be fine. Rank cultures tend to decay, and then the company has to bring in HR brownshirts who impose stack ranking and calibration curves and the like. That's not stable, though, and the people who figure out the system and can extend protection become the new holders of rank and, they, like their predecessors, care more about loyalty than individual performance. So you get a new rank culture after a couple years.
If you've got 4 years in, there's no good reason to stay post check-out unless you absolutely can't find something better.
However, the job hopper stigma can start to rape you in the ass if you have too many short jobs. Let's say that you take a new job and things are going well, but you're demoted at the 6-month mark. After you're demoted or passed over, there's really no good reason to put in high levels of effort. In an ideal world, people could just leave whenever that happened. In the real world, it can catch up with you.
If you don't have any short-term jobs, you can probably start looking, because one short job isn't that bad. If your last two jobs were under a year, you should probably phone it in, do the minimum for a while, and get a 2- or 3-year job on your CV before you move along.
