Love this question. I've worked a few of these and have many friends in similar positions. Looks like people have recommended some of these already, but from my experience:
- Any type of "analyst" position in a (big) healthcare, banking, or college/university. If not "analyst", then a job description that involves both systems administration + programming (actual app development, not just scripting).
Working in big healthcare/banking is usually very secure and very little work unless you happen to land on an A team (which you won't unless you prove exceptional). I have friends in healthcare who "own" legacy applications. Their job is simply to maintain ancient classic ASP or PHP 3.0 applications that are "critical" to business functions. This amounts to a few hours of work a month (!) when the unicorn server running the app has a hiccup and needs a reboot.
Banking can be the same. I held a remote job for a many-billion-dollar-a-year-US-bank doing ASP.NET development and we would be given something like 2-3 months to fix a vague bug like "this report in the admin takes 15 minutes to run can you make it faster?" Then you would look into it and discover said report was running against a server with 256 MB of RAM running DB/2 off of someone's Raspberry PI duct-taped underneath their desk because they couldn't get their official request for a VM through IT. Oh and they had never written a SQL query before so you just rewrote their abomination of CURSOR hell in 15 minutes and suddenly the report was down to 10 seconds so who cares - time to relax for 2 months and watch videos about growing tomatoes in custom-built built hydroponics tubs (I love you Jeb Gardener).
College/university. Side note here: keep any eye open for any job that requires specialized knowledge of massive legacy/clunky applications, e.g. PeopleSoft (Oracle), SalesForce, SharePoint, etc. I had a gig for a few years at my alma mater helping to migrate their student information systems from a home-grown system that worked (but was legacy DB/2) to an Oracle PeopleSoft system that categorically did not work but had a 50 million dollar budget. They started migrating 3 years before I got there, and to my knowledge, are still migrating/facing issues to this day.
The work was hilariously easy: my task would be to work with the integration team to attempt to get a report of all students in our department meeting x, y, z criteria. Since we were working with Oracle directly, any request took 2-4 weeks and never was fulfilled as they outsourced 100% of their development work and the developers couldn't get anything done.
- SMB consulting, avoiding application development. I think someone mentioned answering tickets already which is usually pretty simple, but inevitably you'll end up getting promoted at most consulting gigs. That said, you can get a nice cushy job just installing servers, racks, desktops, etc. It's a bit of physical work sure, but usually most consulting shops have this stuff down pat - 2-4 hours for an install of <x>, 6 onsite hours for <y>, 2 monthly hours for maintenance, etc.
- Technical writing. This is niche as you need to find a company that actually cares about their documentation, but if you're halfway decent at writing this can be an incredibly low-key easy job. Most people are downright terrible at writing and it shows in their documentation (just take a look at most public API docs!). I know an out-of-work writer who got a gig from UpWork to basically fix grammatical errors for an entire API's documentation that turned into a permanent gig as the company was a startup with zero non-technical folks and they absolutely loved her ability to turn their gibberish into human-readable docs. She got to work directly with consumers who greatly benefited from her work and the job was cake as writing came naturally to her - hardest part was learning what some of the technical lingo was.
- Any type of "analyst" position in a (big) healthcare, banking, or college/university. If not "analyst", then a job description that involves both systems administration + programming (actual app development, not just scripting).
Working in big healthcare/banking is usually very secure and very little work unless you happen to land on an A team (which you won't unless you prove exceptional). I have friends in healthcare who "own" legacy applications. Their job is simply to maintain ancient classic ASP or PHP 3.0 applications that are "critical" to business functions. This amounts to a few hours of work a month (!) when the unicorn server running the app has a hiccup and needs a reboot.
Banking can be the same. I held a remote job for a many-billion-dollar-a-year-US-bank doing ASP.NET development and we would be given something like 2-3 months to fix a vague bug like "this report in the admin takes 15 minutes to run can you make it faster?" Then you would look into it and discover said report was running against a server with 256 MB of RAM running DB/2 off of someone's Raspberry PI duct-taped underneath their desk because they couldn't get their official request for a VM through IT. Oh and they had never written a SQL query before so you just rewrote their abomination of CURSOR hell in 15 minutes and suddenly the report was down to 10 seconds so who cares - time to relax for 2 months and watch videos about growing tomatoes in custom-built built hydroponics tubs (I love you Jeb Gardener).
College/university. Side note here: keep any eye open for any job that requires specialized knowledge of massive legacy/clunky applications, e.g. PeopleSoft (Oracle), SalesForce, SharePoint, etc. I had a gig for a few years at my alma mater helping to migrate their student information systems from a home-grown system that worked (but was legacy DB/2) to an Oracle PeopleSoft system that categorically did not work but had a 50 million dollar budget. They started migrating 3 years before I got there, and to my knowledge, are still migrating/facing issues to this day.
The work was hilariously easy: my task would be to work with the integration team to attempt to get a report of all students in our department meeting x, y, z criteria. Since we were working with Oracle directly, any request took 2-4 weeks and never was fulfilled as they outsourced 100% of their development work and the developers couldn't get anything done.
- SMB consulting, avoiding application development. I think someone mentioned answering tickets already which is usually pretty simple, but inevitably you'll end up getting promoted at most consulting gigs. That said, you can get a nice cushy job just installing servers, racks, desktops, etc. It's a bit of physical work sure, but usually most consulting shops have this stuff down pat - 2-4 hours for an install of <x>, 6 onsite hours for <y>, 2 monthly hours for maintenance, etc.
- Technical writing. This is niche as you need to find a company that actually cares about their documentation, but if you're halfway decent at writing this can be an incredibly low-key easy job. Most people are downright terrible at writing and it shows in their documentation (just take a look at most public API docs!). I know an out-of-work writer who got a gig from UpWork to basically fix grammatical errors for an entire API's documentation that turned into a permanent gig as the company was a startup with zero non-technical folks and they absolutely loved her ability to turn their gibberish into human-readable docs. She got to work directly with consumers who greatly benefited from her work and the job was cake as writing came naturally to her - hardest part was learning what some of the technical lingo was.