Actually, this does not apply to good economics papers. Good economics papers have much stronger ways to identify both the independent and dependent variables u

Actually, this does not apply to good economics papers. Good economics papers have much stronger ways to identify both the independent and dependent variables using microdata from public and private sources. Getting access logs for whether people logged in from home or the office is really not a crazy stretch. Measuring the dependent variable "productivity" is actually much harder since firm-level productivity (aka earnings) has a whole host of other things that impact it besides worker-level productivity and we all know how hard it is to measure developer productivity.