This is something I think about all the time. I think I got really really lucky. I'm probably the only person I know who came out way, way ahead especially in the pandemic. I basically got to go on vacation for a year while still getting paid.

So my first two jobs were at startups where my co-workers were ex microsoft and google people. It kicked my ass but I was grateful for the training. I got super burned out so took a job at a hardware company that had a great brand, but I could tell that their software was really subpar and the company was more old school and "family" oriented. I never planned to stay longer than 1 year but the pay was 50% more and I "only" had to work 9-5 and Fridays most people took off early. As scary as it was at the time, I quit after 1 year to work on a side project and try the digital nomad thing out.

Well, less than a year later, the company called me up again because they needed to fill an immediate role. They needed someone with specific language skills as well as knowledge of our products. I honestly was still enjoying funemployment. So I gave them what I thought was an insane salary request and they said it was ok!

My role was all over the place since it was a new team, in a new country and to this day I really don't know how to explain it to people. The first phase was me doing a lot of prototyping work, to see what was possible for our new product. But as things settled and we were able to hire more engineers, I was able to step back more and more. The 2nd phase was me turning into a sort of walking encyclopedia. Since the company did kind of a shit job documenting things and had custom protocols to communicate with the hardware, I became the goto person. But the problem is that I don't think I know that much either, I just was forced by the team to get really good at Slack, Trello, Github search foo.

And now we enter the final phase. I had an accident with my knee and had to work from home for almost a year. During this time, I was probably a bit depressed, but also just tired of uninteresting mangerial type work so I wasn't even doing my minimal tasks as a human search engine. I kept thinking any day now, I'm gonna get a talking to from the boss, and that's when I'll finally get to say I quit. But it never happened! I think part of it is the unique situation where the people in the US thought I was busy with the foreign branch, and vice versa. When in fact, I was not engaged with either and sitting on my ass all day hoping for my leg to recover faster.

During my 1 on 1 review, I was very candid with my boss about my thoughts on leaving, the fact that I wasn't engaged by non-tech work etc... He was very understanding and said that he would fully support me moving to other parts of the company, and pretty much giving me a pep talk saying how I wasn't that bad. It was bizzaro-review, with me saying how shit I was and then him arguing MY case that I was a valued member.

Final phase part 2: With the pandemic in full swing, and still recovering, I spent a ton of time hiking. With the whole company going remote, I think everyone started to get in on the slacking off bandwagon and I was pinged even less than before. It started with an hour hike in the beginning to multiple days just gone in the woods. I think I visited every state park in a 1 hr radius. And STILL nothing bad happened. I could usually still answer something on slack in the middle of the woods. In the summer they gave me permission to work remotely from europe since everyone was remote anyways, and it would help with my ability to catch the timezones of both teams. I would spend entire weeks just being a tourist doing nothing but the occasional emails.

That all said, I think sometime this year I'm going to quit again and make the move to SF. As awesome and rare of an opportunity this is, it just feels... wrong. Skillwise, I've been stagnating. The only interesting tech stuff and learning comes from my side projects. I feel like the most knowledgeable person in the room all the time, which is really scary because I'm an actualy dud compared to the startup coworkers.

I don't know if you _can_ seek this situation out on purpose, but here's what I would look for:

1. a "family" company that respects work life balance. An older company, European maybe (like spotify etc), non software focused, privately held etc
2. a more senior-ish role. A jr dev is gonna be watched and "developed" so I think you need to be the one at the top looking down
3. build up trust and domain knowledge - I _did_ work my ass off in the beginning and somehow became the de facto knowledgeable person after a bunch of people left
4. role that works across timezones - normally this would suck and you would work a lot more, but with #1, you end up working less because people will assume you are working with the other group
5. look for a larger / growing team - this let me step back and delegate my job away
6. have a cool ass boss - I get along really well with my boss. Without all this undeserved trust and praise, I would probably have been canned
7. Be the type of person who doesn't want to be lazy - I don't think you can just jump straight into a job with the "dud" mentality. You have to "trick" people into thinking you actually care, and the only good way to do that is not to trick them but be genuine, then slowly let that attitude wither away by monotony and bureaucracy :) . Also, if you actually are really competent, then you don't have fear of being fired, because you know end of the day you could just "try" and then find another job. Only with this lack of consequences can you start pushing the boundries