1: the "99%" you're looking at are jobs on a specific niche that uses technology to bounce information from one place to another and display them, mostly known as IT jobs.
2: Hard problems are everywhere. Literally. Even in those "99%" jobs you mentioned -- "doing" such software may not be full of mysteries, but make it evolve without break and respond to constraints are examples of real hard challenges. It's a matter of seeing them and putting it on perspective.
3: there are many ways of framing a problem, making it hard or easier. The harder you frame it, the more instruments you will be required to have to tackle it. Those may involve research skills and fluency in an array of fields that would help understand the phenomena. It mostly depend on where in the spectrum of the problem you want to work, and that's up to you to figure it out.
4: advice to avoid a career working on crud apps: interview the interviewer and find out if the problems of the hiring company are the ones that you value.
5: questions like "where to work on hard/fun stuff" are very hard to give satisfying answers. I suggest you take the time to survey problems you are interested, try talking to people working on them...many problems are tackled by teams, often with people with different background and specialties dealing with different aspects of the problem.
2: Hard problems are everywhere. Literally. Even in those "99%" jobs you mentioned -- "doing" such software may not be full of mysteries, but make it evolve without break and respond to constraints are examples of real hard challenges. It's a matter of seeing them and putting it on perspective.
3: there are many ways of framing a problem, making it hard or easier. The harder you frame it, the more instruments you will be required to have to tackle it. Those may involve research skills and fluency in an array of fields that would help understand the phenomena. It mostly depend on where in the spectrum of the problem you want to work, and that's up to you to figure it out.
4: advice to avoid a career working on crud apps: interview the interviewer and find out if the problems of the hiring company are the ones that you value.
5: questions like "where to work on hard/fun stuff" are very hard to give satisfying answers. I suggest you take the time to survey problems you are interested, try talking to people working on them...many problems are tackled by teams, often with people with different background and specialties dealing with different aspects of the problem.