I laughed at least a little when I read this because if I really think about the quality of comments on this subject the last few months, that is a relatively fair -- if sarcastic -- summary.
But you bring up an interesting point about WFH:
> I will never admit to any abuse on my part or anyone else's ever.
I see this a
lot, too. I think the problem stems from the different ways that companies operate. Many,
many companies -- regardless of role -- are having employees work remotely much the same way they were working in the office. And that's not, necessarily, stupid. When I first flipped to remote work, I was was working for a global multi-national telecom that went through bankruptcy. My reporting structure had my boss in the UK, his boss in Green Bay, WI, and his boss (who, at that time, never directed my work) was ... two floors down. I worked in an office outside of a test phone switch outside of a legacy phone switch occupying a whole floor with three people in it, none of whom were on my team, only one of whom was even
in IT (my organization). Moving from "coming in and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" to "staying home and sitting alone in this office working with people in other offices" was a no-lose transition.
I'd gut-feeling a guess that all of the companies trying to bring employees back into the office are working that way or very close to that way -- some variant of "Be in front of your computer during your old office working hours". Well, except for coffee, several co-worker chats about Netflix/Sports/Nonsense. At the only job where I had this kind of schedule (for a period of time), our corporate policies allowed for checking personal e-mail, doing online banking and other personal activities on work time provided they weren't excessive (while signing off on them being monitored, of course). Is running a load of laundry between toilet breaks excessive? At what point does "doing non-work things during those working hours" count as abuse? How do organizations operating this way plan to catch the time thieves? These are all things that managers are panicking about, right now, because some of their employees basically stopped working[0], or they perceive the work being done would be done better if they could go back in time and put asses in chairs.
For roles where this is possible -- and obviously some aren't (and those have bigger trade-offs with remote work, as well) -- performance should be based on the simple question "Is the work getting done in a suitable time-frame?" Isn't that what they paid for? And if performance of all remote employees across the board is unsatisfactory then you have at least two things going on -- you've hired wrong, or you're failing to onboard well. And some people are slacking off, or literally doing no work, remotely. Why are they still employed? Are these people super-productive in the office? I suspect remote work shakes out a lot of people who'd rather have a different job. Those are the people that do shoddy work "in the office" and no work "at home[1]." I've had coworkers do this -- on a couple of occasions we didn't notice because the mistakes stopped which resulted in the team completing more work!
Where I'm currently employed, we have a few meetings, rarely before 10:00 AM, rarely after 3:00 PM. We're designing/building/adding new features to our product, together, and we all work radically different hours (despite most of us being down the street from one another). We're in a crunch time, now, so we're working radically long hours and spending more time on calls, but that will subside. I work from wherever in the heck I happen to be. I have an abundance of hardware/network setup so that I am never connecting to remote resources while developing. Outside of "I delivered what I said I would when I said I would" there's not a whole lot of oversight and I work between 40-50 hours a week like I did when I was in the office at my previous job. I start work between 5:00 and 8:00 -- sometimes I take a mid-day break and finish between 6 and "whenever." We have meetings every work-day so I work M-F, but it's common when someone didn't want to put something down and worked into the late evening to just leave a note and sleep through most of the following work-day. It's about "getting the thing done" and only about "how much time it's taking you to get it done" if you're burning out on 16 hour days when you shouldn't be. The intensity is no less -- probably more -- than it was when I was "in the office at my last job." But the impact of that intensity is a lot less when I have an abundance of control over when and where I work.
[0] It's because they're lazy, right? Have you asked them? Do they know their performance is not adequate? I know of one person who nearly quit a job because he was working 15 hours a day coding boilerplate. He was hired because the team was overwhelmed, but he wasn't working out because he couldn't complete simple things on time. When someone shadowed him for the day, they discovered he wasn't using a handful of scripts and was spending hours writing ... boilerplate.
[1] This happened "in the office" -- in my late teens I did desktop support for an organization with three offices/one main office. Two people usually handled "the non-main offices" working between them in various places. Over a month-long period, one employee stopped coming to work, completely. We discovered only when we rotated in new people to the "offsite offices" and the guy he was paired with said "that guy told him he was working at the main office." I guess he figured out we all kind of worked as an island and he only needed to tell one lie to collect free money.