At a recent real-time Java conference...

At a recent real-time Java conference, the participants were given an awkward question to answer:
"If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark immediately?"
Among the forest of raised hands only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay aboard. With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.

This joke is probably based on a true event. This is a software engineering joke. The humor in this joke centers around the fact that people who develop software think that their software is buggy. In essence it is an insult directed toward software engineers.

The humor in this joke is "sad but true" humor - the type of joke that makes people realize that even if the joke is absurd, it is also true.