More power to them. If their employers are satisfied with the amount of work they're getting then everyone wins. Look at how many people are talking about all the hours they are getting paid to be in meetings. That's unproductive time when they could be doing something useful for another employer.
When I first heard about this a few years ago, I was somewhat outraged, but I've come around.
The specific example that I heard about went something like this. I read the story on Reddit a couple of years ago, so many details are sketchy.
A programmer got a job to automate a very large legal office, during Covid. Previously 2.5 people were doing the job. Essentially, court documents were being delivered to the law office. Then, they were scanned and then saved in the appropriate case file.
First months, more than a full-time job. Then, he wrote a script to read scanned documents and automatically send them to the correct case file.
Next, he found out the court was scanning all the documents before sending out paper copies. So he figured out the API to the court documents and downloaded the documents for the law firm directly from the court database. This eliminated the need to scan the document. Now the job is down to a few hours a day.
Next, he automated the whole process and wrote a script to text his phone if something went wrong. Now the job was like 2 hours a week. He did this for many months, got bored, and took another job.
His employer was delighted, not only was he cheaper than the 2.5 folks he replaced, but the backlog was gone, and everything was up to date.
I think people underestimate the productive impact IT/programmers can make.
During Covid my non-profit (Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor) revenue went to almost zero because the majority of the revenue came from a running gift shop at the memorial which was closed. Our head count went from 80 to 25, so we had to look for ways of working smarter We had a person whose job it was at the warehouse to put price stickers on the product. A person at the bookstore who updated the price as needed and kept track of inventory at the bookstore, and a buyer who placed orders when.
We were spending tens of thousands of dollars/month for a Point of Sale system which came with an intimidating large manual, that nobody had opened since vendors training classes years ago. The one IT guy in the organization opened the manual and experimented with things. We switched from putting prices on individual items and put prices on shelves like grocery stories, took a month or so to do it all. This isn't rocket science, Walmart, etc, having been doing it for decades. But many small and medium have no or minimal IT support so this doesn't happen.