I totally agree. The jobs with the most creative technical problem solving tend to be the tech jobs in non-tech environments. The best job I've ever had was doing Data Science consulting for an insurance company with no Data Science competence and very little IT competence. Unfortunately, the bad-pay part, too, is very much in line with my experience.

That project was very short-lived. Since my consulting rate was 2X what they pay an employee, I couldn't convince them to carry the consulting engagement for long. They would have gladly hired me fulltime but were unwilling to pay more than X. But I knew that, working for a tech company, I could easily make 2X as a long-term fulltime salary, so I was already taking a financial hit by doing the consulting for as little as 2X.

The irony is: They ended up covering my function by buying an out-of-the-box actuarial model and services from their reinsurance provider costing them something like 10X in licensing fees. But they don't seem to care. The piece they care about is keeping the peace within the workforce and ensuring that nobody ever has a reason to be jealous of anybody else's salary and by being a one-man-consulting-show I looked to the workforce too much like I was just one of them and shouldn't get paid more. -- This is where the cycle completes itself. The insurance company's willingness to pay 10X for licensing something that the labour market can create for a price of 2X is the reason why this 10X licensing company can easily afford to pay its employees 2X in salaries. Wasting money like that is probably also a big part of the reason why the insurance company itself can't afford to pay anyone who works there more than X.

According to neoclassical economic theory such at thing shouldn't be able to exist. But neoclassical economics assumes rationality on the part of decision makers where it should be assuming petty jealousy.