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 infrastructur

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.