That’s not necessarily true. I went from a sys admin role to swe through a rather chill process with no one really pushing.
The sys admin job had a lot of downtime, so I started automating some stuff to make my life easier. Then improved upon that stuff to make it more robust to share with the team. Then at some point my boss told me to just work on whatever I thought would help the team, and do that (officially ending the sys admin work that I had largely stopped doing on my own many months earlier). He didn’t really talk to me for 2 years after that. By that time, I had so many projects that I couldn’t do them all myself and he ended up building a whole team around me. Everything went at my pace. Since it was all value-add of stuff that otherwise wouldn’t exist, there were no timelines or pressure. However, I enjoyed it, so I was working 60 hour weeks most of the time, but it all felt very chill. No one was asking me to put in those hours and a good deal of it was more social. As a result, I saw the biggest jumps in salary in my career, while at the same time having the lowest stress, and most enjoyment from my job. But all this started in an office after I had a good deal of time with the company. I didn’t walk into it as a new hire.
These days I feel like I have more stress, but don’t feel like I’m growing at all, because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
For me, growth happens when I’m bored. It’s a way to avoid the boredom. When I’m pushed too hard, I tend not to grow, I shutdown. The best way for a company to get the most out of me is to stick me in a room and let me get bored, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
> because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
It's that yea.
I'm working at a job where I have a lot of time to explore. It's the first time I can tell that I'm growing.
That was a different era. I don’t think it’s applicable in today’s time. Knowing how to be productive with agents is becoming a must. So one can chill maybe if you’re great at context switching between 6 agents running in parallel :)
Exactly. This is a very low effort post. OP wants a chilled job but also wants autonomy, fully remote and are on a Visa. I would be doing the opposite of looking for a chill job if I am on a visa especially right now.
+1, though I'll add it doesn't need to be a completely "non-chill" job.
Your job should be manageable day-to-day with certain period of stress or extra work where you need to push yourself. This is where growth occurs.
Example: You need to learn a new language/framework and maybe spend some extra hours outside of work for a few weeks to ramp up for a new project. But once you have a handle on it, you go back to your regular schedule. And that might even mean now you can relax and work less than your regular schedule. It's all about managing when you grind and when you "coast".
SWE is a demanding job in general so just be prepared to actually "work". as others have said look at large companies where tech is not the selling point. insurance, banks, aviation, large fortune 500 companies.
i've noticed that it is sometimes less about the type of company and more about the immediate manager and their mindset. a competent manager can set expectations with external stakeholders while not overloading their engineers. a good middle manager who can play politics with multiple stakeholders and becomes "liked" really leads to a chill job if they have the correct expectations of their career as well.
> i've noticed that it is sometimes less about the type of company and more about the immediate manager and their mindset.
It's definitely about that. The current company I'm at, I met my manager and have good chemistry with him. Since then, within a year, I got 3 new managers. The department is a mess. My first manager is mentoring me formally. I'm mostly still a part of his team.
His mentorship makes it much easier to stay for me.
Government, maybe also try a union hospital job in IT. They'll pay less but you'll get pension. My friend is a systems architect for Redcap which is a research database software for a large hospital system and he basically teaches doctors how to set up their studies in the database, he has a chill schedule and is always asking me if I want to meet him for hikes or happy hours at 2 or 3pm!
It definitly exists, some managers just want increasing headcount to have more worth among their peers.
My friend has one such job, he's begging for work. His colleagues could easily handle how workload
Be willing to accept less pay. Work in the public sector. Government and education jobs tend to be less demanding and pay commensurately.
As mentioned by others, nobody gets paid to “chill”, but with fewer responsibilities there can be more opportunities to take initiative and grow in a direction that interests you. Once you clear out your backlog if things are slow you can start looking for ways you can improve the system while sharpening your skills on your own terms.
I have four years of experience and have been looking for a job for over a year. It’s been difficult to find a role, even while being open to relocation.
I became a data analyst after being a SWE after 4 years. I'm blowing every DA out of the water and am secretly still software engineering. I just call it "working with AI" (I work with a lot of non-technical people).
I don't work in software but left my old job in 2021. Was unemployed for 2 years by choice. Finally decided to get a job in 2023. I applied to two jobs, got both of them right away and picked the one that sounded better.
Fast forward to summer 2025. Tired of this job and wanted to do something else. Applied to 50 jobs in 2025 and nothing but crickets. Not even a single response let alone an interview.
I am pretty sure my time doing knowledge work is coming to an end. Remote? No way I ever get a remote job again after this. I am just so average.
I am mostly trying to get in really good shape for when I have to do some kind of work that involves not sitting at a desk all day.
I was looking for a job in 2023 - a standard C#/JS/Python development job where they wanted AWS experience. At the time according to my resume, I had 10 years of experience (many more years of experience. But not one cares about my programming in C on mainframes in the 90s) including 2 leading AWS architecture at a startup and 3.5 working directly at AWS (full time consulting division).
After being Amazoned for shits and giggles I randomly applied for hundreds of jobs that I was qualified for - I heard crickets. I never do this and I didn’t expect much to come from it.
I did her multiple offers in a couple of weeks via my network and targeted outreach to recruiters where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that’s popular. But not many people have experience with.
On another note, the mid size company I work for sent around 300 offers last year and we had an offer/application rate of 0.4%.
Every opening for any remote job gets literally hundreds of applications within 24 hours. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd.
Learn to solve problems on the job and churn out solutions quickly, and then use that remaining time to "chill". That's how I have a decently paid job while occupying every other bit of time to university study.
I feel like I'll be in your position soon, as well. 3 years at this company, but have been feeling the darkness pouring in. (in the last year, top sales people quit/got fired, and the CTO just quit.)
Absolutely no idea how I'm going to get another job. The area I live in is horrible. Hope for the best.
Work for big companies that offer SWE positions they don‘t really need but won‘t downsize due to lack of accountability.
Never join small, privately owned (or even worse, privately controlled!) companies with extreme accountability and ownership. No startups. Run if they mention they are a company that is performance driven or a place where you can make an impact.
You want to be one of many random swe who can hide among his peers and you want to be able to make tons of meetings and red tape responsible for your slow progress.
Government, insurances, banks, big-corpo-bodyleasing consulting (like accenture, NOT „high pressure boutique consulting“). Body lease consulting is ideal, you can regularly leave behind the mess you caused and move on.
Mutually incompatible. A chill job won't teach you new things, since chill implies unchallenging. Most interesting learnings will happen when you cross the point of no return, where you feel really challenged or even overburdened at times.
You would do good to consider what "chill" means to you. Not a lot of work? Work that is easy? Relaxed environment with cool collegues that don't have sticks up their asses? Once you found that phrase it more precisely, since chill mainly imples you want to not work but get money for it.
“Chill” and “grow“ don’t often go together. You get complacent and fall into routine. You grow when you’re pushed and do uncomfortable things.
That’s not necessarily true. I went from a sys admin role to swe through a rather chill process with no one really pushing.
The sys admin job had a lot of downtime, so I started automating some stuff to make my life easier. Then improved upon that stuff to make it more robust to share with the team. Then at some point my boss told me to just work on whatever I thought would help the team, and do that (officially ending the sys admin work that I had largely stopped doing on my own many months earlier). He didn’t really talk to me for 2 years after that. By that time, I had so many projects that I couldn’t do them all myself and he ended up building a whole team around me. Everything went at my pace. Since it was all value-add of stuff that otherwise wouldn’t exist, there were no timelines or pressure. However, I enjoyed it, so I was working 60 hour weeks most of the time, but it all felt very chill. No one was asking me to put in those hours and a good deal of it was more social. As a result, I saw the biggest jumps in salary in my career, while at the same time having the lowest stress, and most enjoyment from my job. But all this started in an office after I had a good deal of time with the company. I didn’t walk into it as a new hire.
These days I feel like I have more stress, but don’t feel like I’m growing at all, because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
For me, growth happens when I’m bored. It’s a way to avoid the boredom. When I’m pushed too hard, I tend not to grow, I shutdown. The best way for a company to get the most out of me is to stick me in a room and let me get bored, as counterintuitive as that sounds.
> because there is no room for exploration and growth with all the deadlines and shifting priorities that have me never knowing which direction to go or when the direction with drastically change.
It's that yea.
I'm working at a job where I have a lot of time to explore. It's the first time I can tell that I'm growing.
That was a different era. I don’t think it’s applicable in today’s time. Knowing how to be productive with agents is becoming a must. So one can chill maybe if you’re great at context switching between 6 agents running in parallel :)
Exactly. This is a very low effort post. OP wants a chilled job but also wants autonomy, fully remote and are on a Visa. I would be doing the opposite of looking for a chill job if I am on a visa especially right now.
Growth = stress + rest
Non-chill means constant stress. Chill means you have the flexibility to do either, or at least the autonomy and trust to stress yourself as needed.
+1, though I'll add it doesn't need to be a completely "non-chill" job.
Your job should be manageable day-to-day with certain period of stress or extra work where you need to push yourself. This is where growth occurs.
Example: You need to learn a new language/framework and maybe spend some extra hours outside of work for a few weeks to ramp up for a new project. But once you have a handle on it, you go back to your regular schedule. And that might even mean now you can relax and work less than your regular schedule. It's all about managing when you grind and when you "coast".
SWE is a demanding job in general so just be prepared to actually "work". as others have said look at large companies where tech is not the selling point. insurance, banks, aviation, large fortune 500 companies.
i've noticed that it is sometimes less about the type of company and more about the immediate manager and their mindset. a competent manager can set expectations with external stakeholders while not overloading their engineers. a good middle manager who can play politics with multiple stakeholders and becomes "liked" really leads to a chill job if they have the correct expectations of their career as well.
> i've noticed that it is sometimes less about the type of company and more about the immediate manager and their mindset.
It's definitely about that. The current company I'm at, I met my manager and have good chemistry with him. Since then, within a year, I got 3 new managers. The department is a mess. My first manager is mentoring me formally. I'm mostly still a part of his team.
His mentorship makes it much easier to stay for me.
Government, maybe also try a union hospital job in IT. They'll pay less but you'll get pension. My friend is a systems architect for Redcap which is a research database software for a large hospital system and he basically teaches doctors how to set up their studies in the database, he has a chill schedule and is always asking me if I want to meet him for hikes or happy hours at 2 or 3pm!
I work with hospital IT people at customer sites. Can confirm that the positions seem to require neither extensive knowledge nor effort.
Why would someone pay you “to chill”? Do you have any special skills that would make you highly valued to a company and you would be a prime catch?
It definitly exists, some managers just want increasing headcount to have more worth among their peers. My friend has one such job, he's begging for work. His colleagues could easily handle how workload
That doesn't sound like a job where you also grow...at all...
On a visa too
> Why would someone pay you “to chill”?
Since you asked,
there’s a series of scenes in Silicon Valley where people are hired and just put on ice just to keep them from advancing competition.
This reflects reality.
Not post 2022 if you haven’t checked.
And even then, those companies weren’t looking to hire up all of the random enterprise CRUD full stack developers.
I put myself in that category. If you take away my AWS account, I’m just a senior enterprise Dev who knows how to talk to people.
> I’m just a senior enterprise Dev who knows how to talk to people.
Lots of devs don’t even know how to talk to their colleagues or spouse, let alone an arbitrary person for business development.
Engineers are definitely considered chess board pieces in the AI debt wars.
Be willing to accept less pay. Work in the public sector. Government and education jobs tend to be less demanding and pay commensurately.
As mentioned by others, nobody gets paid to “chill”, but with fewer responsibilities there can be more opportunities to take initiative and grow in a direction that interests you. Once you clear out your backlog if things are slow you can start looking for ways you can improve the system while sharpening your skills on your own terms.
Work in the Public sector can be exhaustive, since some branches are severly underfinanced, at least in Germany.
In current market I would really not filter remote only.
Get a job first. Even if not remote.
Then you keep applying for remote jobs.
Referrals from people who youve worked with. Best way to know what its like to work somewhere is someone currently working there
Best to reframe “chill” to work life balance and emphasize how you’ll be able to contribute better when you’re well resourced
I have four years of experience and have been looking for a job for over a year. It’s been difficult to find a role, even while being open to relocation.
Almost out of money.
As a wise man once said: I'm cooked
I became a data analyst after being a SWE after 4 years. I'm blowing every DA out of the water and am secretly still software engineering. I just call it "working with AI" (I work with a lot of non-technical people).
Think about moving. Job markets are vastly different geographically and have been for some time.
I don't work in software but left my old job in 2021. Was unemployed for 2 years by choice. Finally decided to get a job in 2023. I applied to two jobs, got both of them right away and picked the one that sounded better. Fast forward to summer 2025. Tired of this job and wanted to do something else. Applied to 50 jobs in 2025 and nothing but crickets. Not even a single response let alone an interview. I am pretty sure my time doing knowledge work is coming to an end. Remote? No way I ever get a remote job again after this. I am just so average. I am mostly trying to get in really good shape for when I have to do some kind of work that involves not sitting at a desk all day.
You only applied for 50 jobs in a year?
I was looking for a job in 2023 - a standard C#/JS/Python development job where they wanted AWS experience. At the time according to my resume, I had 10 years of experience (many more years of experience. But not one cares about my programming in C on mainframes in the 90s) including 2 leading AWS architecture at a startup and 3.5 working directly at AWS (full time consulting division).
After being Amazoned for shits and giggles I randomly applied for hundreds of jobs that I was qualified for - I heard crickets. I never do this and I didn’t expect much to come from it.
I did her multiple offers in a couple of weeks via my network and targeted outreach to recruiters where I was an industry expert in a niche of AWS that’s popular. But not many people have experience with.
On another note, the mid size company I work for sent around 300 offers last year and we had an offer/application rate of 0.4%.
Every opening for any remote job gets literally hundreds of applications within 24 hours. It’s almost impossible to stand out from the crowd.
Probably won't find it remote. I would say gov contractors / gov jobs could be chill.. not sure how visa would interact with that process, sorry.
Learn to solve problems on the job and churn out solutions quickly, and then use that remaining time to "chill". That's how I have a decently paid job while occupying every other bit of time to university study.
I feel like I'll be in your position soon, as well. 3 years at this company, but have been feeling the darkness pouring in. (in the last year, top sales people quit/got fired, and the CTO just quit.)
Absolutely no idea how I'm going to get another job. The area I live in is horrible. Hope for the best.
Sounds like you had a sweet gig for awhile. Quickest way at this point is probably to build a time machine. Sorry :/
Work for big companies that offer SWE positions they don‘t really need but won‘t downsize due to lack of accountability.
Never join small, privately owned (or even worse, privately controlled!) companies with extreme accountability and ownership. No startups. Run if they mention they are a company that is performance driven or a place where you can make an impact.
You want to be one of many random swe who can hide among his peers and you want to be able to make tons of meetings and red tape responsible for your slow progress.
Government, insurances, banks, big-corpo-bodyleasing consulting (like accenture, NOT „high pressure boutique consulting“). Body lease consulting is ideal, you can regularly leave behind the mess you caused and move on.
I work as a staff consultant full time for a boutique cloud consulting company. It’s not high pressure at all.
If you want to be stay chill with your work then you have to firstly do hardworking this gives real chill with things that will happen in the future.
start your own company
In most cases, that’s the opposite of chill.
As do remote, responsibilities and autonomy
Mutually incompatible. A chill job won't teach you new things, since chill implies unchallenging. Most interesting learnings will happen when you cross the point of no return, where you feel really challenged or even overburdened at times.
You would do good to consider what "chill" means to you. Not a lot of work? Work that is easy? Relaxed environment with cool collegues that don't have sticks up their asses? Once you found that phrase it more precisely, since chill mainly imples you want to not work but get money for it.
Start by learning to sell yourself effectively.
What does "chill" even mean? If I saw that on an application... delete.