withad

Notch apparently hoped that it was just "lawyers being lawyers" early on, but I doubt it would have gone this far without important people at Bethesda/ZeniMax noticing and (presumably) supporting it.

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.

There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example.

But other than that, no one really.