I'm just stating my opinion. I disagree with your original premise that all these people making Facebook games would (or even could) be solving the world's prob

I'm just stating my opinion. I disagree with your original premise that all these people making Facebook games would (or even could) be solving the world's problems in completely unrelated sectors if market forces were aligned differently. This is the long standing hubris of the programmer, and you see it all the time on blogs and online forums, dating way back to the USENET era. If only I didn't have to do my boring job, I'd be a brain surgeon and a rock star, invent organic gasoline, do angelina jolie and natalie portman at the same time, and maybe even reconcile quantum physics with newtonian mechanics as a side hobby. This mindset has recently expanded into the popular consciousness, with opinion pieces by every jowly conservatively liberal political columnist, and even stated by the president of the united states, who publicly lamented the fact that all these engineers are engineering themselves more money in the stock market instead of engineering up some new fuel sources. (The messed up part about that, is all those talking heads have degrees in journalism and law. Fuck you and get back to me after you pass freshman physics...) I just don't believe the notion that any somewhat smart person can be successful at anything to be true. People tend to self-select into careers they think they'll be sort of good at. I've worked in both science and e-commerce, and most of the e-commerce people would be bad at science, and most of the scientists would be bad at e-commerce. I just happened to be able to work in both fields because they both need big databases. I honestly don't believe we've lost any great scientists or nobel peace prize winners to Zygna. The notion that skills are fungible at such a high level is like saying that if only Americans cared about soccer, the members of the Yankees would be winning the world cup instead of wasting their time playing baseball. It's ridiculous. I don't really get your example, though. A decade ago, the people who are coding social networks today were 12. I don't think they had a lot of financial angst driving them away from their 6th grade research careers.