Huh, no, I actually work. I mean, I spend some time reading HN or other research/skill-building (job-related), or on facebook (not job-related) like anyone else. And of course, as you mention, plenty of job related but non-coding time. I consider "talking a walk to think through this problem" working. And nobody can be 100% productive; and I do things like non-work phone calls on work hours when convenient.

But, no, I don't spend days in which I spend no time on my job (maybe an occasional day in which I'm in bad physical or emotional health and can't get it together to get any work done, but don't take leave; these are not typical). Overall, most days, I'm mostly working.

I think I'd actually go crazy if I was in your situation, I don't think it would make me happy, it would make me feel useless and unfulfilled. i've been in situations like that at non-coding jobs, and while in theory getting paid not to work sounded great to me, in fact it was not good for my mental/emotional health to be sitting around all day not working and not doing much else.

Unless I was remote maybe, perhaps I'd just do other things that I wanted to do that really had nothing to do with work (learn a musical instrument, learn a foreign language, make art), and feel fulfilled, as long as I wasn't guilty about ripping off my employer (which I guess could depend on the employer).

You say you weren't remote before pandemic. I'm curious what you did with all that time you aren't working? and how you think it makes you feel to be in this situation, are you happy with it, does it make you feel crappy even though you think you oughta be happy with it, other?

I am also curious what you think of the work you hypothetically could be doing. Is it horribly boring? Does it seem really useless, like nobody is going to care or benefit even if you did it? Are there barriers in the organization such that you don't think you could produce anything that really benefited anyone even if you tried?

I think maybe part of it is that programmers might be wildly variant in productivity? If you're getting good perf reviews, could there be someone else working more of their full time, but producing no more than you? I think maybe at a lot of places, the people doing evaluation simply have no ability to evaluate engineers, they have no idea.

I have worked before with people who produced literally nothing. If they got good perf reviews, I guess it's because their supervisors didn't expect anything? Perhaps their supervisors weren't working much either? Or just didn't know how emotionally to deal with a bad review? I had one coworker who (many years pre-pandemic) "worked from home", but when a rare urgent thing in their domain happened to come up, it turned out they didn't actually have the tools to work on it at home; I suspect they were never working at all from home. I wasn't very happy with this overall condition, but I'd never try to "turn them in" -- not necessarily that it would be "too awkward", but, I'm no snitch and don't want to be one. Who knows what's going on in that person's life.

I would have appreciated a coworker who could carry the load instead, but I've realized that I am significantly motivated by doing a good job, making high-quality products... and many people, and many whole organizations just aren't, they have other motivations. I've learned I'm not going to be happy unless I'm at a place where doing quality work is a motivation of many people.

Also... I actually enjoy writing code?