I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products.
I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple:
* Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world.
* Simplicity isn’t simple... It means rethinking every customer experience until the clutter has fallen away — until all that remains is what’s essential, useful, and beautiful. That might be a new product feature that delights even die-hard fans.
From Google, specifically an interview with Google employees about work there:
* ”... love to work on challenging projects”
* ”... love being faced with problems that were not ever solved before”
* ”... you hear people talking about algorithms and coding and programming languages”
* ”... it was just a pleasure being interviewed by smart people and being given a lot of puzzling questions”
I discussed this in a blog post I wrote which you can find here: http://mgp.github.com/2012/02/13/problems-and-products.html
I used to work at Google, and I joined there during a period when I wanted to work on interesting (i.e. hard) problems. I left to work on interesting products.
