«You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.» (Orson Scott Card)
It looks like a piece of poetic fiction, appropriate for the author.
The largest piece of context I could find online is [1], dated 1995, and written apparently earlier, at the time when programming was seen as wizardry, not really engineering, and definitely not as a knowledge-heavy but mundane money-making occupation, on par with a stock trader.
