People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world.
This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism. After years in this business I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It's good society has Yahoos and Facebooks in which to employ all these self styled geniuses, because otherwise they'd be fucking up someone else's pharmaceutical research. If only I would have made Facebook I wouldn't have to sit at the crappy desk next to the fume hood.
"This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism....All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do."
Ah, yes...the world is so much simpler when it's in black and white, isn't it?
Aside from the fact that it's entirely possible to enjoy a career and still see its deficiencies, you're just making assertions and pretending they're factual.
Unless you believe that all of the people who are coding social networks today were absolutely miserable with their careers a decade ago, your typical smart person could be happy doing many different things. Just because they're writing flash games today doesn't mean that's automatically the optimal job for their happiness and the well-being of the world. Capitalism doesn't optimize for what you seem to think it does.
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.
This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism. After years in this business I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It's good society has Yahoos and Facebooks in which to employ all these self styled geniuses, because otherwise they'd be fucking up someone else's pharmaceutical research. If only I would have made Facebook I wouldn't have to sit at the crappy desk next to the fume hood.