Which role in software engineering is the best for average person?

What an odd question. Why strive to be average?

For clarification:

The rat-race is tiring. I have given up on it even before starting. The hardest thing in life is giving up. It took a long self talk to reach an agreement where I am truly an average in what I do.

There are so many people out there, who can do marvelous things. Meanwhile I am just an average dude trying to make a comfortable life.

I want to minimize my effort and maximize the reward. This is the motivation of asking this question. Not everyone can be good at things, there are so many factors.

I sometimes think I should have studied medicine because an average doctor has it better than an average engineer. It was foolish of me to follow a dream that was never supposed to be made for me.

Probably whatever sounds most interesting, honestly. They all have a pretty high ceiling and they are all challenging to some degree.

Back end and devops probably give the best combo of pay and work life balance.

Front end had you chasing frameworks. Front end for you own projects is OK but for a company get ready to learn the latest React nonsense while supporting Angular, JQuery Plugins and everything else that was in vogue over the life of your codebase. Unless you join a disciplined team that doesn’t chase fads or rewrites everything each time.

Game dev is famous for bad work life balance. Not sure about pay? Working for Roblox is probably decent?

The best paid will be FAANG (USA only) or Fintech esp. Trading.

For career development if I had time again I might go more into sales engineer, with the option to into pure sales or start a business with the help of all those friends you made! Or be a business analyst for a year or two.

Inside the Engineering wheelhouse it feels CTO is the real career progression and if you don’t want to be on that path it is harder to find career opportunities.

Do you really want to be "average" at your job? What do you really want to do?

I've worked with barely average developers and believe me, they frustrate the rest of the team. They'll copy-and-paste the same code 5x instead of asking where they should put a new module. They'll commit untested code into main, and leave it to the next guy to clean it up, just so they can close their ticket. Communication is often poor. We all don't know things. The problem with "average" is they don't ask questions.

I think there should be an innate quality about someone in software that they enjoy the work. If it didn’t pay well I’d still be doing this, I love working with computers and started before google came about. If people are in it for the money and don’t enjoy the work they will likely not do well, not excel at anything, not be curious about learning and just plod along to get by. As much as you don’t need a degree to do software its not a skilled trade like an electrician where the job details are very structured around proven solutions.

All that being said, I think someone is better off looking at organization styles and culture than job titles for a comfortable, earn your keep, engineering job.

Enterprise software in a large non tech business. Being above average won’t really help you there as the bureaucracy will choke and discard your skills, but you can get away with being average and have a pretty chill job.

Whichever position that doesn't let you remain an average person for long :)