However, look at the size of the West Coast tech industry vs. the size of tech firms in New England or the Midwest. That's what I mean by an economic argument. I got paid 5x more at Google than I did in Boston, and I was employee #45,000 or so, not even an early employee.
That is, everyone always assumes in our industry that the chaos allows this volume of people to be employed. But usually large number of people leads to chaos all by itself. Maybe we have it backward.
I know I've worked on a lot of projects that got version one out quick and could never get version 3 out the door. It gets old after a while. Why do I want to spend a few years of my life working on something nobody will remember? No thanks.
Rather, I think money is the primary causal agent. The top 5 most valuable companies on earth right now are all West Coast tech companies, and they got that way by building software systems that are an integral part of the lives of billions of people. The fact that software is an integral part of those activities is a function of it being a million+ times more efficient than humans; any company could've filled that need, but AppAmaGooBookSoft was the one who actually did it first.
Money (and specifically, rapid growth in customers & revenues) causes chaos, and money causes lots of people to be employed, and money lets you pay them a lot. The specific engineering practices - at this stage in the industry - are a sideshow. They're important to practitioners, but not important to customers, as long as the software basically works. And the reason TDD has fallen short is because you can build software that "basically works" without it, so it's just overhead until you need software that "really needs to work in all situations".
I see TDD as a practice that requires a lot of discipline.
The TDD equivalent of crossing every t and dotting every i requires sustained attention and intention.
It's interesting what happens when you look at rankings of engineering programs, especially at the grad level. You start to see more large state institutions, as well as more technical institutions, with a heavier concentration in the mid west or west coast.
The ivies are hardly missing in action, especially Cornell (should probably also say Columbia) but Texas, Washington, many UC campuses, certainly Michigan... I'd probably put all these, certainly at the graduate engineering level, at or above the ivies. And the ivy that really seems to be a heavy hitter here, Cornell, again shows how much things have shuffled up once you go to engineering.