I don't think engineering environments can be reduced to salary. Working culture is personally far more important to me. I don't want to work through ticket after ticket with respective optimized performance metrics. That can net a lot of cash but is a boring but still stressful job where your colleagues become your competitors like in a badly managed sales department per stereotype.

On the other hand the work in some supposedly benefit rich countries can be bad as well. You can grind your head against walls too big to tackle. People in general aren't very interested in technology or efficient solutions. The word software induces a panic where people just throw money at the first one to never utter the word again.

But more so than country, the respective company is probably more important. Smaller companies also have interesting problems and the work there is preferable with far more freedom. They pay is worse than their larger competitors though.