Sure, I hear you and I've experienced this too. I've been on nightmare ASP.net spaghetti code projects that would be good fodder for programming sites. VB projects that are a stitched-together set of tools with a frontend full of a million buttons, etc.
But on the flip side, have you never worked at a company full of Ruby/PHP/Python engineers that have trouble getting their software to build and run correctly? People with billions of dollars who find the prospect of putting something on a web page—for a business model that has existed for a century—challenging? I have many times, and it's a reflection of how insular that segment of the industry is that they don't find anything weird about this.
In contrast, there's an army of JVM engineers out there that don't spend any time on HN because the JVM solved the problems HN talks about 20 years ago. They don't need to talk about it or consider it "news" because it isn't. For instance, the technical level of InfoQ is whole echelons higher than here. This is not to disparage the very real benefits that the "Hacker" mentality has provided to the world. SV are accomplished business and product people, and they've managed to impress the world with the type of organizational scale they can deliver. But technical it ain't.
