Really? This is like a nerd mantra, it hits so many stereotypes in so few words. Orson talked about it at BayCon once when it came up.

I don't have a clear memory of exactly what he said but I took away from it that smart, introverted, people have a terrible time seeing anything outside their pool of influence, like looking at your shoes in a crowd and saying "everyone is crowding around me because I'm the coolest" when if you looked up you would see a pack of wolves circling the crowd. So all of their evaluation in their environment is about them and how people around them are responding.

An artifact of that inward looking view is to construct an internally consistent explanation for why things suck now but didn't before. That always targets people who are not like them (the introvert) and for whom the introvert cannot understand their motivations or values. (and more often than not in a software company that is "suits", aka business people or managers)

You combine that with a changing market place, and the thing that made the software successful before isn't valid any more, but if the programmers don't know why the software was successful in the first place they can't understand what changed or how to fix it. Imagine an artist who paints with charcoal, gets discovered, people buy their works, and then fashion moves on, and the artist goes broke. To an external viewer, fashion simply moved on, the artist was there (and fashionable for a time) and then they weren't. But internally the artist may have no concept of how briefly they were fashionable and now they weren't. Instead they construct an externalization of "discovery" where suddenly people begin to understand what it is they are doing with their art, and when they move on it is always some external force which has corrupted the minds of people seeing it or modified their vision. To accept the alternative, that their success was luck and fashion, rather than some deeper meaning, may be too harsh to think.

People cling to sense of destiny and purpose rather than consider themselves the random connection of ova and zygote and circumstance. Where is the meaning in that?

Orson captured this tension wonderfully in his essay, it resonates both with the bees who desperately want to be special and with the bee keepers who want productive bees without understanding that the bee's production is a byproduct of flowers and normal bee activity, it's a side effect of where the hive is and where the flowers are. Many software companies are fashion objects, successful ones are constantly producing new concepts and new ideas to stay in the limelight. Unsuccessful ones take a single success and assume they are done, nothing left to do but iterate. But fashion doesn't work like that.

Programmers and businessmen have a difficult time understanding each other, is basically the crux of it. As a programmer and a businessman, I have to say I still have difficulty understanding most businessmen, and do not respect MBA degrees (not necessarily their holders).