>If it means I don't do any work on a Tuesday, who cares? All that matters is if I'm delivering what is expected of me (e.g. my spring tickets) and available for communication. If I spend 4 hours a day working & 4 hours studying & playing mahjong online, what's it to you, you know?

Enlightened employers realize this. It's not super common in the industry yet, but if you can find an employer who doesn't track your productivity by seeing how many meetings you attend and how often you're sitting at your desk alt-tabbing between VS Code and Github to look productive, you've hit the jackpot.

Success should (ideally) be measured by value-add to the company, and dependability of the employee. Not many employers/managers know how to track value-add though. For a non-tech-savvy manager to measure the success of an engineer is difficult. They might look at your code commit and see that you removed 400 lines of code and added 20 and think of this as a "negative" impact because the numbers don't look nice. It's a frustrating aspect of the industry, but possible to work around if you work with decent people.

The relationship you're describing is contracting. Salaried employees don't have a pre-negotiated scope of work; "what's expected of you" isn't fixed in advance. This cuts both ways. If something runs late, you don't take a financial loss. But if something runs early, you don't get the time back either. The company has purchased everything you can get done in a workday. If that's more than average, it's more than average.

> The relationship you're describing is contracting.

The relationship I'm describing is actually at-will employment. I have quite a bit of freedom to do whatever I want with my time so long as my employer is still willing to pay me. I have no obligation to operate at my personal 100% unless my employer demands it (in times of need, it can be the case. But that's rare!)

I have found it easier to work a full day on Friday when I'm at home, because people aren't gathering in the kitchen pouring beer and making cocktails at 4pm.

(I'd love that if I started working at 7am like some of my coworkers, but when I start at 9:30am, the day feels a little truncated.)

yea I think the reason its worth mentioning is that when you talk about a report that will claim that 30%+ of jobs could be done from home, then the question is how many of those jobs can be setup in a way where it can be measured in a way that doesn't switch from "butts in seats at the office" to "keep your webcam on all the time or you are fired".. certain jobs may have the right combination of "not very fun to do" and "hard to measure output".. so as a result the default state for people would be to likely trend toward lower productivity without somebody minding them. So the helpful metric to add to these 30+% of jobs that could be done from home would be how likely they can be done without a manager that either pushes people to perform in some way or requires assistance on a regular basis to more junior employees to keep their productivity and learning curve moving.

I feel you, and you are likely right for software, but for any business that e.g. needs to do things when markets (or other businesses) are open, this will never be the case in practice.