It's actually quite possible to write software with very few bugs if any. NASA does it all the time. I do it in my personal projects, though they're a very different order of magnitude.

Other engineering trades managed to get very close to 100% bug free. How often do buildings collapse in developed countries?

But this doesn't happen by accident. You have to set up a system to do it, and then you have to accept that sometimes there will be unexpected delays. Management has to take estimates by their staff seriously, and if a job takes a month to do badly but three months to do well, you have to spend the three months.

The interesting part is that writing (almost) bug-free software doesn't take much longer than writing regular software, once you've done the groundwork. The writing takes longer, but you make up for it by all the time you don't spend debugging.

I'm sure the CTO was an arrogant loonie though, because bug-free code would start with him, not the developers.