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.

Ouch.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...