This is only a harm if you are ambitious and career-oriented. I'm remote and know it won't be conducive to promotion, but I also get to:

1) live in the low CoL area that I grew up in,

2) be near family and friends (and therefore free, high-quality childcare),

3) avoid a hellish commute in one of the sprawl-y hellscapes that grow up around tech hub cities,

4) live in a paid-off house instead of 50%+ of my income going directly to rent or a mortgage, and

5) have a massive nest egg due to all the money I'm saving.

Could I get faster promotions by going back to the office? Maybe, though I see the careers of my at-the-office colleagues around me stagnating just about as much as mine. But...I don't want to be management. I don't even necessarily care for promotion as an IC unless that's the only way to tread water with inflation.

The only major downside I think about is that it will obviously be harder to get a remote position if I lose the one I have, but we're financially prepared for that. With a paid-off house in a single-car neighborhood, we can make ends meet with a normal job stocking groceries or something. At the worst case, I have connections to get a job at the factory a town over, though that would mean getting a second car.

In other words: I, as a worker, do not care about maximizing the value of my human capital stock. I am not cattle. I am not a slave. I have preferences that are unrelated to my ability to receive praise and promotions from my boss. In short, I deserve respect from my employer, whether they are currently being forced to give it or not.

That's not what it is about though. There is plenty of evidence that there are pros and cons both to WFH and work-at-the-office, assuming the work lends itself to work-from-home to begin with. This is at best a datapoint and not so much a grand conclusion worthy one at that.

The metric 'code productivity' alone is such a terrible one. I remember the 80's when such things were introduced. The best one that I ran into professionally was 'object code size' (because we don't want to count those pesky comment lines as production now, do we?). It didn't take long for the rookie in the team to outscore everybody else based on those metrics. He found the largest library in the system to link to...

In general I'm against such metrification of productivity and in software I'm more against it than in other industries because I think software quality is a very hard thing to measure to begin with. Lines-of-code and such are useful on an assets list during a business transaction in a descriptive way. But they're not very useful in other contexts.

As for the code review data they analyzed:

"We find that sitting near coworkers increases the online feed- back that engineers receive on their computer code. Engineers ask more follow- up questions online when sitting together, and so, proximity can not only increase in-person but also digital communication. Proximity is particularly integral to the online feedback received by young and less tenured engineers. "

I've seen the exact opposite happen as well. Proximity decreased the feedback because there was no need to communicate formally what could be communicated informally.

> [has benefits]

Long-term and for the company. Of course I’m going to dismiss it lol, why the fuck would I want to be left holding the bag?