If they didn't give you any work to do you could always use your own initiative to create tools/apps that they might need, or work on improving processes. If that doesn't seem like fun, you could contract out or just look for another job. All that free time sounds like fun to me.
I wrote a few tools when I found myself in a similar position, and was rewarded with being told that writing code (while not technically a developer) was a "security risk"[0]; and I was then given a bunch of useless Sisyphus-type jobs that management never quite agreed were finished (they were gold). To this day I think they were surprised, but not sad, to see me go. Only managers I've ever had who didn't absolutely love me and my work ethic. Easily the worst job I've ever had. Took me awhile at my next job to shake off the "bad vibes".
[0]I'm still kinda baffled by this one. I had root access to everything already and could easily have written any malicious code I wanted to introduce at home.
Amazing how dysfunctional IT auditing has made management in so many places. We have auditors worried that devs can push to production, but there's no one to audit the code except us, and we have full access to production databases. You'd think they either trust us or don't, but the half assed security of not pushing to prod seems just needlessly malicious. "You guys are a bunch of untrustworthy scoundrels, but you can access prod DB's and possibly hide evil code in your apps, but at least someone else will push it to production for you".
