There are companies every day trying to genuinely make the world a better place, like the healthcare IT one that I work for, trying to open up a Steam-like platform to do signal processing in hospitals. Or the not one but two charity fundraising startups bootstrapping in my city. Or the test-grading automation startup in Dallas.
And yet, because these companies aren't within walking distance of the Valley VCs, and because they are sometimes tackling industry problems that take more than a year to close a basic deal on (seriously, fuck hospital invoicing and billing), they have enormous trouble getting out of the valley of startup death because no funding available that permits easy growth. And because the local VCs in these cities are looking for easy deals, they just fly over for their day trips to the coast, and ignore what's in their own backyards.
So, for fuck's sake, let's not complain about the developers who are trying to eke out a living--let's instead take a long, hard look at the market and society that rewards them, and understand that that is the root of the problem.
EDIT: Minor clarification in paragraph two.