My theory is that jobs that pay me well have interesting problems to solve because otherwise they'd pick a cheaper engineer. So I don't worry about how the job sounds and just assume that if it pays a lot better, it will probably come with interesting challenges. So far I haven't been wrong, but maybe I'm just lucky.
I don't think it's true that high paid jobs tend to be interesting, but they do tend to be impactful. A lot of big tech jobs are about cleaning up infrastructure technical debt, in many cases the work is pretty boring, but between the number of engineers at these companies and the scale of their products, even very small improvements can be force multiplied. However, even though there is a lot of downstream impact, it won't be super visible to you. It's the classic "if an engineer can save 15 minutes of every Google engineer's time every day, that's worth billions to the company."
But to more broadly agree with your point, I do think if one job pays you a lot more than the other, on average that's because they value you more, and they will be a lot less likely to waste your time. If you work for 50k a year, your CEO will be happy to have you work on all sorts of stupid things because you're cheap so why not. If they pay you 500k a year, they're going to want to make sure that whatever you work on is actually important to the business because now when the accountants add up costs you are going to be more significant. Furthermore, psychologically it's hard not for a boss to value someone making 500k more than one making 50k a year.
I'm sure there are many, many exceptions where people are paid poorly and working on super interesting or important things (medical research being a common example), or paid well to work on meaningless stuff, but as a rule of thumb, I do think higher paying jobs tend to be better jobs independently of the bigger paycheck.
The tech megacorps are kind of an exception to this. They've got enough money to pay double what you'd get at another company and then put you on whatever dreadful project they couldn't get anyone else to work on. That's an "interesting challenge" I suppose but not the kind most people mean.
The problem is that it's hard to define what's meant by interesting. It could be that companies who pay well have to because most people don't find their problems interesting so they need to pay more just to get people in the door, but there can be interesting aspects to almost any job and if you're the kind of person that focuses on finding the interesting in the otherwise boring then you'll tend to find the job interesting and feel like you lucked out in some way.
> because most people don't find their problems interesting so they need to pay more just to get people in the door,
That's true when we're talking about a difference between 8$/h and 20$/h. If we're talking 50$/h vs 100$/h, or 100$/h vs 200$/h, I'm willing to take the bet that higher-paying job is going to be challenging enough. But indeed, it's also up to the person - in one job you may fix code, in another you may set up processes for entire teams, and if you just want to be left alone to code stuff that you like, what I said is absolutely not true (the opposite is - at some point you start to have to code less). Some other commenter nailed it - higher paid jobs tend to be more impactful. Whether "interesting" or not, that's subjective.
are you at a FAANG-tier company? I'm not and never have been, but would say I'm quite well-paid, and this is absolutely not my experience. They pay a lot because it's work nobody wants to do.
Eh, a better model I've found in the general case is negotiating strength. In that model the people who were perceived to not be able to get a better salary also get shit work to do.
