There are also plenty of programmers who are just lazy and don't want to work a lot. Check out any of the dozens (hundreds?) of comments on Blind of people working 15, 20, 25 hours a week. Total.
"I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now" doesn't take you very far.
I've had weeks were i worked 60 hours of crunch, but most weeks, even if i was at the office i work barely more than 25 hours. Between reading tech news, gossip, researching a bit on this totally new tech that seems nice, trying to justify a POC to my n+1/n+2 and preparing slides on "why leaving Jenkins totally make sense", i did so much false work that honestly would annoy me if i was a manager. Now i'm leaving my computer for 30 minute pauses, it is far healthier for me, i'm more effective at my job and i stopped wasting my time and the time of my collegues on meaningless presentations. I still do somes on "clean code" or "how to rework your commits to prepare efficient code reviews", but it is for the benefit of the team, while the one i did pre-covid were for my entertainment.
That depends, though. How many people reading this thread would say, "I'm sitting in my cube surfing the 'net, but trust me I'm totally working right now"?
The best code I’ve ever written was when I was only working 10 hours a week. Hours worked has no positive correlation with quality of code written. Good managers know letting their devs watch birds and relax will result in a much higher quality of output then forcing them into the office and dropping by their desk to prod them.
Well wining and dining has taken management folks quite far and writing same-old CRUD app thousandth time by hand is not gonna take developers very far.
"I'm sitting on my porch drinking a beer and watching birds but trust me I'm totally working right now" doesn't take you very far.