That quote comes from here [1]. A few lines later, writing about a talk he had given at a software company, he says:
I gave a beautiful lecture, which fell flat on its face. The
managers were horrified at the suggestion that flawless software
should be delivered since company derived its stability from the
subsequent maintenance contracts. The programmers were horrified
too: they derived their intellectual excitement from not quite
understanding what they were doing and their professional
satisfaction from finding weird bugs they had first introduced in
their daring irresponsibility. Teaching the competence to program
boils down to the training of misfits.
> Teaching the competence to program boils down to the training of misfits.
Haha. Ohh geez, herding cats.
Of course, the joke is I can have the most consistent, predictable engineer ever. He gives me a constant stream of ones. Always passes the test. But I don't even know what Zero means.
Anyways, in the real world I've just had a major issue dumped in my lap and I just need to stop the fucking bleeding in a complex system.
[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...