I understand our point - it's really a trade-off between things; and as well the situation is definitely more or less tough, depending on your area. I totally

I understand our point - it's really a trade-off between things; and as well the situation is definitely more or less tough, depending on your area. I totally agree with searching for jobs that actually teach you things does bring money on the long run. Sidenote: I put an emphasis on 'actually' because it seems to me that it's difficult to know which job will teach you the most beforehands... It could be the CRUD one, if I use your example :) For instance, in 2006, I had already been moving heavily from .Net to Ruby. Yet someone called me back with a .Net project in mind. I went there just by principle - and ended up doing data aggregation, continuous integration at a scale I had never done before! This has heavily influenced what I do today. As well I was working as a consultant for a large bank, promoting application infrastructure (services, ioc etc), continuous integration, testing practices. Before that, I could possibly have told that bank was boring and I wouldn't learn anything - it was the other way round in the end.