This sounds so unbelievably ignorant I laughed. Do you honestly think solving a problem that aids "everyone" is worthless, or cannot pay bills? Just an fyi, pharmaceutical industry is actually pretty lucrative because everyone is vulnerable to illness.

Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it.

I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.

Solving a problem would be worth a great deal. Thinking about how to solve a problem is not worth a great deal. Attacking problems that have been unsolved for decades, despite lots of work, seems like a poor idea when compared to smaller problems that can actually be solved today.

If some folks were just trying to pay the bills, working in government or biotech would be fine. What kind of bills are we talking about? I think it's more that sex and photo sharing, at the moment, net an excess of wealth quickly and efficiently.