On the other hand, engineers working at self driving cars at Waymo earn much more than engineers making CRUD apps at random non-tech companies. The pay discrep

On the other hand, engineers working at self driving cars at Waymo earn much more than engineers making CRUD apps at random non-tech companies. The pay discrepancy has nothing to do with interestingness. It's just that total demand for software engineers is extremely high -- programming has become almost like accounting in that virtually every business that's not very small needs some -- and there are a good number of massively profitable tech and tech-oriented companies that can and must compete for strong coding talent.