Yes, well, at some point you get tired of seeing people make the same mistakes over and over. Those people might be senior engineers tasked with architectural design for the first time. Those people might be management with their heads up their....um, with misguided ideas.

So the Senior Staff position may involve less day-to-day coding/design, but a lot more heading off disaster, which I would argue adds huge value to the company, and personally I find satisfying. In fact, there is nothing less satisfying than failing to head off a disaster that you could see coming from miles away.

I remember a very senior IC at one company I worked at, named Gary. Gary basically wandered from meeting-to-meeting, only attending a few minutes because his calendar was routinely triple-booked. He would listen to a few minutes of argumentation, ask the one question that would slice the problem open like a sharp machete to a coconut, and then move on to the next meeting. Didn't design much any more, but his contributions had huge leverage.

Don't write off that some day you may want to be a Gary. It may come naturally at some point, when you frequently start thinking: "I've seen this movie before and it has a baaaad ending."

Same. Just be who you are. The tech industry “growth expectations” culture is garbage.

Just as a personal anecdote everyone told me constantly that I would never make Staff Engineer at Google (roughly the 90th percentile rank) by just contributing to the code base. But that is what I did, and I was promoted to that rank. And I got the satisfaction of not participating in all the anti patterns of “leadership “ where one person gets promoted for taking credit for the work of many other people, or for solving problems they also created, etc.

In short I rather admire a trade like dentistry or carpentry where one just practices one’s skills to the best of their ability, and there is no such thing as “Senior Staff Dentist”.

There is nothing wrong with knowing what you like to do, and doing it. And having folk like you on a team is important - teams struggle whenever everyone is jockeying for a better position. So while "unambitious" can get a negative connotation, it deserves more respect - it gets the job done, and that is valuable.

You can be ambitious and still hate everything to do with career tracks and personal development as seen by large corporations.

I make sure I work somewhere that isn't too stressful, and pace myself as much as possible at the dayjob so I can work 20+ hours per week on my own business.

I wish I could have a 3-day workweek so the other 4 days I could be coding my own projects. After $100k why do people even want more money? I just want more time to work on my projects for a chance to have my own business. I'll never understand why so many people choose to be put into golden handcuffs.