I feel I am working on interesting technical problems. However, it didn't come over night, and while there was certainly some luck involved, it also took a lot of hard work on my part, and actively looking for the challenges I wanted to be involved with. This is a little long winded, but here's how I did it:

I took a job right out of school in the early to mid 90s doing boring CRUD work. I did it for 2 years and made a good living at it. But I wasn't interested in it. I learned a lot by going on site with actual users, but I knew I wanted to get out of doing that type of work.

I was pretty passionate about Mac development and decided I should be making a living at it. I ended up applying to a few different small to medium-sized businesses where my couple of years at a (boring) Fortune 500 company looked good. I found one that was doing boring Mac development, but it was Mac development. I took the job, and the work conditions were horrid. I left after less than 6 months.

Here's where it gets interesting. I specifically looked for jobs that weren't working on business or productivity applications. I really liked graphics, video, and audio development. (I had been doing some in my spare time and even released some shareware that never made any money.) Eventually I found a small company that did Photoshop plug-ins and printing-industry graphics work. It wasn't as cool as game development or visual effects, but it was pretty cool. The company, though, was horribly mismanaged (by a husband and wife team that ended up getting divorced shortly after I left the company a few years later).

After seeing how poorly run the company was, I ended up starting my own company writing video plug-ins. I also started going to conferences related to Mac development, graphics, and video. I made connections at these events. I also met people in real life that had helped me with programming questions online. I signed up to be on user mailing lists where potential and actual customers hung out to see what the problems they needed solved were.

I ran my company doing VFX plug-ins for about 5 years. While the company wasn't going broke, it also wasn't making any money. I decided to shut it down, sold the assets, and found a job working on a well-known professional video editing suite. I've been at that job for over a decade and love it. It has given me numerous interesting projects to work on. It involves a lot of the same stuff that game dev does, but without the crazy schedules. (Well, usually.) I do interesting graphics and video work. (I could probably do audio if I wanted to, but the graphics stuff is keeping me very busy at the moment.) In addition to the boring parts of just cutting together clips, I've written hundreds of visual effects filters, transitions, and generators. I worked in 3D, VR, AR, etc. I've learned an enormous amount of human biology (why do we see things the way we do), technical specifications (29.97 vs. 30fps, color spaces, etc.), algorithms, artistry (can I make a real camera do this effect? If so, can I imitate it with a virtual camera?), craftwork, etc.

When I was getting ready to graduate college, I really wanted a job like this. I went to a pretty good school (so, yeah, a little bit of lottery winning in there), but there were enough students better than me that I didn't get picked by the cool companies. But I went on to study the things I thought I would have done at those companies on my own and eventually ended up back at one of those companies I didn't get accepted to originally.

Every painful step along the way taught me something. I learned a lot about users, business requirements, and the development cycle from the boring Fortune 500 company. It wasn't interesting stuff, but it was useful and important. I learned not to waste time with poorly managed companies at my first Mac gig. I learned a lot of graphics stuff writing Photoshop plug-ins. And I learned how to make connections, and figure out what users want from running my own company. And now I have what it takes to work where I wanted to work in the first place. It took me about 12 years from graduation to starting this job.