[bodiekane]

Controversial stance, but... almost any big company, as long as you don't care too much about promotions or the social hierarchy of your coworkers.

Get a $150k job as a senior software engineer, show up to meetings, do good-enough work and be polite and friendly to your coworkers and you'll basically be fine.

At performance review time you'll get the low-performer raise of 3% instead of the high-performer raise of 4%, but your hourly wage comes out ahead. Maybe you'll be a little more likely to get laid off in lean times, but those are sufficiently arbitrary that you could work nights and weekends and still get laid off.

Plenty of people have lived happy, well-rounded lives putting their energy into their families, hobbies and self-fulfillment while coasting through their career as a lower-than-average-performer in a series of 1-4 year stints at different companies.

[cableshaft]

> show up to meetings, do good-enough work and be polite and friendly to your coworkers...as a lower-than-average-performer

I'd argue that this shouldn't be considered 'lower than average' performance. It should be considered average. And based on some companies I've been at, that should probably be considered above-average.

I know that's often not the case by managers and executives (hell I just saw an article about a CEO that is running an AI startup and tells people in interviews that they're expected to work 84 hour weeks[1]), but employees should really push back and insist that this should not be considered 'below average' performance.

[1]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/greptile-daksh-gupta-8...

[2rsf]

You are right, but Microsoft (a small local site of a few years ago) disagreed- "meet expectations", which in my eyes is close enough to average if the expectations were set correctly, was consistently treated as bad or lower than average.

[farseer]

It also depends on your education, IQ and productivity. If your job is slightly out of your league, you will struggle to have a work life balance.