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I have realized I am someone who needs at least one of these things to be happy with work, and I’m currently not getting any of them. This next year I would like to seriously make an effort to get on track to change this for myself.
I'm also surprised to find teaching is harder work than a 24/7 saas. You can become removed from your users in IT. Your users in teaching are right in front of you with all their joy, stuff of life, and drama.
For a while as a student I worked for a nursery that supplied plants to restaurants we would go to when they were vacuuming the floors and stuff. Pick up all the plants, take them outside for water and light for a couple hours, and set them back up. Just reminiscing about it last night at a dinner where they had poinsettias everywhere.
It's a tough job but somebody has to do it :)
Edit: Also when I was in college in north Florida, we used to drive rental cars back from points south where the popular destinations and resorts were. We would crowd into one car and head down to Tampa or Orlando and come back with half a dozen cars or more.
I write code in C# or C++ (but also Python, pipelines, scripts, JS, etc.) and it needs to be somewhat efficient. We all follow the same rules (62304 especially), we must write unit tests, and make sure that my features are properly integrated at all steps of the development up to the release, and even after when you must validate it with the authorities, when you have bugs, etc. If you're in a small company, everyone can be involved in all the processes and it's fun because you go much further than mere development (like preparing reports for various agencies all over the world, or helping PhDs integrate their code in the application).
We have commit hooks to check and format code, pipelines must be green. You cannot cheat because someone will find out. And you can’t pretend that your code worked once on your computer because the test team will refuse your code if it breaks anything. It’s more rigorous at all steps of the development.
Last but not least we have specifications for everything because it’s the law. Overall it’s what software engineering should have been all the time. It feels like working at NASA even if it's only a stupid desktop tool or application.
Of course everything is not perfect, you can stumble on assholes like every other company, but it's not everywhere. I’m happy to go to work every day, I may have saved a life or two with my code, and that's a good feeling.
My experience comes from having worked with the biggest assholes on the planet at different companies. To answer your question, I would say that an interesting job is rigorous, peaceful, and has some kind of meaning.
Edit: as another guy said, I too settled for lesser wage to work for a company that would not destroy my soul and spirit. That's important too.
I was a helpdesk dude, worked as domain admin for a handful of companies and have worked from my homedesk. I gave it up, settled for lesser wage to break out that boring chore every day. Now i am a service technician for copy machines again. That job i did 20 years ago and re-entered that business. For me its more interesting to deal with people face to face and to leave the house. Gone are the days i had to stay on…
My whole life I've worked on places that work performance was everything in software engineering, many toxic places etc.
I hope at some point I can chill down and make peace with myself like you did. Congratulations!
Now I'm tech lead in numerous cloud projects, hold workshops to share my knowledge (reduce the bus factor), and even adopted some eager mentees along the way.
It's interesting to me and certainly fulfilling to be laying the foundations of such an epic journey at a multi-billion Euro company.
I love building and coding has always drawn me in. I also love working with people so managing engineers and later whole teams turned out to be fulfilling. Now as an advisor I get to pick projects that have particular aspects of management that I liked and companies need. Along the way I learned that I like being a teacher and enjoy recruiting. Both of these things surprised me.
Also I have more time left over and am getting back to the roots of building things.
Along the way I learned a ton. I had to change my mindset numerous times. It was not easy going and there was a lot of effort and frustration along the way. Building a business involves marketing and selling and those are the things that come hardest to me. However, I even found those parts to be fulfilling in the right ratio with building.
Key thing is realizing that past a certain point more money does not translate in more happiness. If you can define what you might like doing, and can build up some cash reserves, give the new passion a go. It feels dangerous and will require a lot of work, but if it works out you’ll be glad. If it does not work out you can always go back to what you did before.