I realized over the years that I'm very good at writing quality code very fast, building features, investigating & fixing bugs, and knocking out tickets. I understand systems easily, have a reverse engineering background, and can usually start contributing to a new codebase within a couple hours. But, I don't enjoy writing specs or design docs, leading projects, or working on open-ended problems. I don't want to "own" entire subsystems. I understand architecture and can contribute suggestions, but I don't want my job to consist of making architecture decisions. I just want to write code. I'm a good low-level problem solver.
Is there a job where I can just get paid to take well-defined tickets and implement them? I'd like to just be a machine in the org that takes tickets as input and produces commits as output. I'd be very good at fixing bugs, refactoring, cleaning up tech debt, building well-defined features on top of existing systems, writing tests, and such.
I'm aware the current meta is something like "writing code is the easiest part of software engineering" and it's all the stuff I don't want to do that gets you promoted. I basically want a terminal non-senior position, with the understanding that I'm happy staying there.
Is there anything like that out there? I recently discovered https://www.gitstart.com which sounds like the ideal, but they don't seem to be taking new applicants.
FWIW I think it's unlikely to be seen as a very valuable skill by most companies, because, as you have probably already seen, most employers value higher-level decision making skills more.