Ask HN: Where can I work if I'm just a good developer?

I live in the Bay Area and I’m exhausted trying to prepare and interview like I’m a 10x ultra high performing engineer that will transform everything I touch into solid gold if just given the chance. The truth is, I’m not this person and I don’t have any interest in becoming this person. I have a solid set of skills that I’ve worked hard to achieve, I take pride in my work and work well with others, and I’m confident I can do a good job once hired, but I am someone who does not want my work to be the defining characteristic of who I am. I just want work to be work and how I pay my bills so that I can do the things that bring me joy in life outside of work.

I feel like I’m at a crossroads in my career where I would need to do an enormous amount of self study, interview prep, and personal projects to get to the next level where most of the companies I have interviewed at seem to expect people to be at day one, and if I’m being honest with myself I don’t have the interest to do it anymore. I don’t want to spend my free time this way after already working a full time job where I write code all day, I’m not interested in learning the minute intricacies of technologies I already use at work, I have other ways I want to spend my time frankly.

Are there companies that exist that have a more realistic expectation of hiring and performance standards? I’m not asking for a free lunch, but just something where it’s enough to show up, put in a good day of productive work, then go home. I honestly feel like we (software engineers) take our profession and ourselves a little too seriously in general. Doctors get paged in emergency situations and might have to wake up in the middle of the night. The fact that I can be on call and have to wake up at 4 AM to debug an issue with an analytics dashboard is just ridiculous. Some companies are actually trying to go to 996 work schedules to “win” the AI race, like what is going on here?

My sincere advice: move out of the Bay Area.

Sure but where to?

Pretty much every company has some software component to it these days, even if it’s for internal tooling. Find a normal company and work on that stuff, not a “tech company”.

Raleigh Durham triangle is low COL with a lot of lower case t tech jobs. And doesn’t seem to be in the crosshairs of the government.