Are you sure I can’t save it in case I need to get out of the Backrooms some day?

This is bullshit. There are many people hired with the job title “Software Engineer” who don’t sit and generate code, and for a number of reasons.

You could be on a hybrid team that does projects and support, so you spend 80% of your time attending meetings, working tickets, working with users, and shuffling paper in whatever asinine change management process your company happens to use.

I have worked places where “engineers” ended up having to spend most of their time dicking around in ServiceNow/Remedy/etc. instead of doing their actual jobs. That’s shitty business process design and shitty management, and not a reflection of the employee doing nothing.