That's not an example of what he's talking about. He's talking about people creating reasons to explain away a real problem in a way that preserves reputation or personal peace-of-mind.
What he's talking about is the pattern you get when you speak to an Alzheimer's sufferer who is trying to pretend they have nothing wrong. They can be extremely convincing to you and themselves for a while making up excuses for why things are the way they are. Eventually they exhaust (rapidly, if you make them reload context) and the facade falls away.
Programmers do this stuff all the time. "Oh it has to be this way because ... [some bullshit reason that doesn't explain why a customer has a reasonable objection to the software cracking its head doing a double blackflip when they asked it to step forward]". Is it reasonable to the educated impartial observer that a piece of enterprise software should crap itself on a null pointer exception and start silently failing? Not remotely. Will you find programmers defending their software when it exhibits such behaviour? All the time.
What he's talking about is the pattern you get when you speak to an Alzheimer's sufferer who is trying to pretend they have nothing wrong. They can be extremely convincing to you and themselves for a while making up excuses for why things are the way they are. Eventually they exhaust (rapidly, if you make them reload context) and the facade falls away.
Programmers do this stuff all the time. "Oh it has to be this way because ... [some bullshit reason that doesn't explain why a customer has a reasonable objection to the software cracking its head doing a double blackflip when they asked it to step forward]". Is it reasonable to the educated impartial observer that a piece of enterprise software should crap itself on a null pointer exception and start silently failing? Not remotely. Will you find programmers defending their software when it exhibits such behaviour? All the time.