I didn't mean it to be insulting or to imply that there are not talented people in the Midwest. What I mean is that if you look to places like Louisville, KY for just one example, or Dayton, OH and look at the type of pay that is being offered there, it is vastly below the coasts. Even adjusted for cost of living and other expenses, many cities across the midwest pay below what is a reasonable market value, and naturally they only get people who will accept those below-market rates.

When I said 'the midwest' in my original post I didn't mean places like Chicago, St.Louis, or Indianapolis that pay industry standards adjusted for cost-of-living. It isn't out of the realm of possibility though for someone to get 10+ years experience in a place like Lexington and have them still not know basic things EVEN after having been trained.

Again this is just my anecdotal experience, I don't mean to insult anyone from these places. This is about brain-drain and salaries, not about anything intrinsic about a place or their people.

i'm not sure why location has anything to do with code quality. imo, it doesn't.

It doesn't, but it does.

We all know small businesses don't care about code quality. Ditto that best practices take a long time to trickle down from ivory towers to business, academia, to bootcamps.

Companies pushing the status quo tend to cluster. Poster probably shouldn't have picked on the midwest, it could be anywhere outside "cutting-edge" software centers.

This pushing of best practices you speak of is clustering especially in the geographic area where the norm is frequent job-hopping (before you fully reap what your practices sow), and where many also celebrate "move fast, and break things" during each employment stopover?

Yes, almost all of these companies are still doing better than the IT shops I remember from the 90's.

The "Joel Test" was a thing, for a reason.

If you heard about all of the bad code at Twitter pre-IPO, large companies don’t care about code quality either.

Startups are a bit different in that it doesn’t make sense to pay down most debt until a profit stream is found.

Or until they convince someone to acquire them or convince the public markets to give them money and remain unprofitable.

It's true that many devs aren't trained to write maintainable code, but there needs to be some responsibility on the part of the individual dev too. If there's no training, they need to be made aware of resources like Code Complete and Clean Code, so they can take some initiative and work through those books.