I employee a number of high caliber software engineers (MS and PhD level folks). I'm pretty sure there's a balance between interestingness and pay. If you are an eningeer in adtech, you should reasonably expect to get paid in gold bars. We should make it expensive for companies to be in that business. If you are solving cancer, lifting giant boats, or going to Mars, then you have a much more interesting problem to work on.
Should we pay those folks more? Sure? But they like doing the work. Perhaps we should also demand far higher salaries from adtech companies. Like, $10M annual.
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.
High end research has always been able to attract tier one candidates to work for them at low pay as they want to do a PHD.
Unfortunately this depresses pay -when I started at a world leading hydrodynamics research in the UK in the late 70's I was paid about 1/3 of the equivalent grade in the civil service!
which is why I left technically interesting programming job and sold my soul to the commerce.
Should we pay those folks more? Sure? But they like doing the work. Perhaps we should also demand far higher salaries from adtech companies. Like, $10M annual.