Well, when software engineering is as good for one's personal social life as being an athlete, perhaps I'll buy your argument. :)
More seriously, I see what you're saying--that said, there is a huuuuge difference between how we develop software now versus even five years ago, much less ten or twenty.
Github. Stack Overflow. Agile methods (ugh). Lean methodologies. Various testing methodologies. Changes in the funding structure of companies. Order of magnitude increase (comfortably) in debugging tools for web and network applications. The entire single-page browser app movement. The entire GPGPU movement. Truly convenient and open collaborative coding platforms.
The field, and the people in it, have changed a great deal, and we've learned a lot. I'm increasingly skeptical of professors of professional software engineering who don't, as a day job, professionally engineer software. This applies to other folks--and I mean this nicely--like Uncle Bob or Martin Fowler as well.
Folks like Carmack who have been pushing the envelope and getting scarred the hard way for 20 years are probably simply better sources of learning.
TDD and agile are both about 15 years old, and both built on well-established pre-existing development patterns. Github doesn't change many of the fundamentals of how software improves in quality or how development works.
What I've observed in the industry has been a shocking lack of self-awareness about application of best practices, and decidedly half-assed attempts to improve. The state of the industry is not dev shops on the bleeding edge of the best tools, best methodologies, best policies, etc. It's almost universally a tale of failing to even get to "ok" in terms of well-known best (or even better) practices. There are a ton of dev shops that don't do any code reviews at all, and formal code reviews (which have been shown to be one of the best methods for improving code quality) are almost unheard of. Even at places that take testing seriously or do TDD they still typically don't do it very well.
That's why folks like Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler continue to have so much traction in the industry, because simply following good advice that was old 20 years ago is still a huge step forward for the average, or even above average, dev shop in the industry today.
Saying "we've learned a lot" just tells me that I shouldn't take you seriously, because clearly we haven't. Software dev. is still a shambles. Security is still a nightmare. Performance is still a nightmare. Quality and robustness is still a nightmare. Work/life balance is still a nightmare.
Reading books like "The Mythical Man Month" (which is 40 years old!) still holds a ton of lessons that have yet to be taken to heart by the majority of the industry.
