GameInformer magazine ran an interview of Howard Scott Shaw (creator of Yar's Revenge, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.). It's a fascinating article and I hope they post it on their site.
I thought the best out-take from the article was “I always have the 80/20 theory of programmers. Eighty percent of programmers go into technology to avoid people. If these people were not programmers they would be accountants and actuaries. The other 20 percent are artistic types who view computers as a vehicle for expression. These are people that, if they weren't doing programming, would be musicians, painters or sculptors.”
When this gets posted to the web, I'll place a link under articles to this one. I think game development gives some of the best pictures of software development - where they're developing software that models a world instead of the other way around.