Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked.

Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.

> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.

But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?

When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.

I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work.

This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.

> don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google)

How do you think Google grows? They invented PageRank and have been on a set trajectory since?

Google didn't catch up to and surpass OpenAI by doing nothing.

If someone is actually working 8 solid hours every day 5 days a week on office work, I would expect they are neurodivergent in some way. Even in college when you were still young, people couldn't sustain that level of focused intensity for very much more than maybe a week ahead of an exam, often with the help of adderall.

That is a lot of thoughts and feelings. There is plenty of research you can read before throwing out opinions.

You claim a significant amount of qualitative data here; how did you measure it? Sounds like some WAGs. Confounding variables don't matter when the "data" is guesswork.

Do they work or is that just their at the office?

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