[lazaroclapp]

> Not necessarily. It is entirely possible to have a job where your role is to figure out elegant solutions to hard problems.

Sure. But often when that's the case your title will say something closer to "Principal Researcher", rather than "Software Developer Engineer".

Don't get me wrong, a good thing about a job in engineering is that figuring elegant solutions to hard problems is a significant part of what you do there. Also, you can definitely optimize for that being a larger part of your time, if you aim for that when choosing where to work.

However, the jobs for which that is the only function you are employed to fill, and where you are expected to delegate maintenance of your elegant solution to someone else, are exceedingly rare. That's why the academic job market in CS is so much harsher (including industry research labs) than the software development job market. And, for the record, research work does end up involving either some amount of grunt work or some amount of management work at every place and level I have seen so far (universities, industry research labs, etc)

[danieltillett]

As a former academic I would say that there is more boring grunt work in academia than industry. Even worse a lot of it is totally pointless activity caused by the university bureaucrats needing to justify their position.