> But instead they feel motivated to work for a big company on long-term useless problems.
I remember this opinion also surfacing with the Steve Yegge OSCON 2011 presentation[1]. In which he complained about Google, and all the hard working people there, focusing on social media instead of hard problems. There was a good discussion as to why these problems are not in the forefront.
[1] http://youtu.be/vKmQW_Nkfk8?t=5m47s
Subsequent discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2811818
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/hacker-news-fires-st...