out of something like 20 year IT career, i only worked in office for 2 out of those 20. early in the career i definitely traded income for wfh option, but it wa

out of something like 20 year IT career, i only worked in office for 2 out of those 20. early in the career i definitely traded income for wfh option, but it was my choice, i also had to structure my life significantly around the requirements of wfh: i've never documented my home setup, but if you've read accounts of elaborate remote work setups, that people like stephen wolfram have, mine's pretty much the same. i have _lights_ for my conference calls. i never advocated for wfh though, and the last few years have convinced me that it is not an option that should be available to everyone: i have data to support the argument that for a certain type of worker productivity dropped somewhere between 20 and 40%. i've extracted that data out of repositories of the various companies i'm contracting for, so this is all obviously non publishable, but that's a research that anyone can do. my experience is with small to medium size business, 9-90 developers, where COVID essentially forced wfh, that was never corrected. and the productivity drop correlates with the overall initial productivity of the respective person. type-A developers, remote developer specialists had almost no perceptable drop. but the space fillers, the 9 to 5-ers, entire teams of them, who also account for the bulk of contributors, that is the main body of the company's workforce drop by 20-40%. there are also interesting outliers, people whose productivity dropped by something like 80-90%, i guess that's the silent quitter types. (i tried to control for as many things as possible, but of course you can't account for, for example, stylistic changes.)