If you’re a boss, Devon may be your worst nightmare. The software engineer is supposed to spend his days typically writing code for Google’s tools and products. It sounds like laborious work, but he says he only works one hour per day.

Devon, a pseudonym Fortune is using to protect his privacy, says he begins his week writing code for “a decent part” of any given assignment before sending it off to his manager. That “basically guarantees” him smooth sailing for the rest of the week. He says he typically wakes up around 9 a.m. to shower and make breakfast before working until 11 a.m. or noon, at which point he switches to working on his start-up until 9 or 10 p.m. (Fortune reviewed time-stamped screenshots showing the extent of start-up work that Devon performed during his workday.)

When Fortune spoke with Devon shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific Time, he admitted he’d not yet opened his laptop. Asked whether he was concerned about missing a message from his manager, he said that if he does, “it’s not the end of the world—I’ll just get back to it later tonight.”

Devon counts himself among the thousands of tech workers who, by their own admission, are paid to do nothing. During a business boom in the early pandemic, companies like Meta, Google, and Salesforce were “hiring ahead of demand,” Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told the Wall Street Journal. The trend was dubbed “penning,” in which companies desperate to hoard workers in advance of what they were certain would be a prolonged growth period made lucrative offers for roles that weren’t needed. Many hires waited for tasks that never came; a 2021 poll on anonymous workplace forum Blind revealed that a third of tech workers only worked for less than half of the workday.

This is exactly what’s happened at Google, says Devon, who earns nearly $150,000 a year, according to his offer letter that Fortune reviewed. Leaders were just “buying up everyone they can so they don’t go to another company…building a product that competes with Google,” he says. When Google laid off 12,000 people in January, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote that the company had “hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today” and will focus on hiring only “critical roles” in the future. (Google declined Fortune’s request to comment on this story.)