I’m sure that level of pay doesn’t have many coasters.
At $150k, I was coasting at a large company for a few years, but it wasn’t like I did _nothing_. I did my sprint work as assigned within the sprint.
It's weird to count literally doing your job as requested as "coasting."
If you’re not pushing the envelope to be noticed more and build your promotion packet, you’re coasting.
No, I'd say that's just not being ambitious, which is different from coasting.
My managers and principal engineers on my team made it clear that NOT actively working to build promotion packet materials and engaging in self-marketing within the company placed me at a lower rank over time.
It was explicitly not good enough to do my job as described. They used a system called stack ranking and (unofficially) they would put people lower on the ranks on PIPs and prepare to let them go even if they were fulfilling their responsibilities to the letter (but not above)
Maybe this wasn’t the case for staff level engineers, but it was for mid levels (which I was at the time)
Tech jobs on the whole are broadly easier than other industries like medical or legal. Even accounting for familiarity bias, I'm confident that my job is significantly easier than my doctor's or my vet's despite us being in similar income brackets. That doesn't make it easy, just closer to a sane workload.
If you work at ticket clinic, your job as a lawyer is probably pretty easy.
If you work in algorithmic trading at Jane street, your job is probably pretty challenging.