[withad]

And what is the "so much more" that these talented programmers could (and, in your opinion, should) be doing instead? I'm genuinely curious, since most programming jobs that I can think of aren't exactly world-changing.

Yes, a programmer in the video game industry might spend their days debugging the mammary physics of "the next killing simulator". But they might also create the next Braid or Minecraft, helping a lot of people connect and have fun in the process. Similarly, a programmer outside the games industry is much more likely to be tweaking some bespoke piece of accounting software than they are making the next Facebook.

[gfodor]

I think you bring up a good point. The person making the mammary physics simulation or Braid are probably two different types of people.

I think the reason for this is because the person working on Braid chose to balance technical challenges with other things important to them. A 2d platformer is certainly less interesting to build from an engineering standpoint than building a navier-stokes based milk dynamics solver in CUDA :) But, the Braid engineer knows they are working on an ambitious, novel piece of art. It's this tradeoff that I don't think most people are making, and I think most video game engineers do not see themselves as agents to push the boundary of contributing in an artistic sense to a greater whole as those on games like Braid do, particularly.

The post in this thread sparked my comment because it mentioned the most drawing position in gaming is the coveted engine programmer position. To me, this sounds like people want to work on bleeding-edge technical problems without regards to the fact their engines are probably being applied towards shoveling out violent, dry crap from the mainstream gaming studios. I once had one-dimensional goals like this too ("I want to work on global illumination algorithms!") but this has changed for me dramatically over time.