Because most people whose job is research today have to work all the time in busywork BS, lest they get fired. To churn BS papers just to stay afloat of publish-or-perish, to attend all kinds of BS meetings, to do all kinds of BS administrative work that has bureaucratically exploded in the last 30 years, to do dog and pony shows for grants, and so on.

They could only dream of "spending almost all of their time thinking and recording his ideas"

Most people in general have this problem. You have to be Dijkstra (or his equivalent in your field) to solve it. And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6.

It's a rare quality of any profession, and sub-genre in that profession, that you are paid to think, and even rarer that it's worth doing so for an individual.

>And some people can't: you can't be so good at plumbing you only have to work 1 day a week, and can think the other 6.

Sure. But my point wasn't that "all professions/people should have that", but that we should let researchers and thinkers, to research and think, as opposed to bloating their day to day work with bureucratic and "dog and pony" show BS.

In the case of researchers this would be equivalent to letting the plumber do actual plumbing, as opposed to having them attend BS meetings and file increasingly more reports and perform BS rituals some idiots in management create as requirements to justify their salaries.

As we know that this less the case, as you go back in the decades. The administrative "BS" part of academic work has skyrocketed, to the detriment of the actual work.

I had a research advisor explain that the timesheets are a formality if you are productive: You might mentally write your abstract in the shower, think about the research problem in the bus, get distracted while you're in the lab, rehearse parts of a talk with a friend between classes... Which of these counts as work time?

One of my favorite professors came in only on Fridays (except when the department would meet). They met with the research group, taught, had office hours, and then went home. I don't think they did nothing the other 6 days, but they also never sacrificed mental health for the sake of appearing busy.

Even then, management realized that WFH was just an excuse to goof-off if your butt was not seen in the company chair.

The full quote surrounding that from my comment:

> At this point, Dijkstra had become the opposite of busy. He spent almost all of his time thinking and recording his ideas. He only came to campus on Tuesdays. And yet, as Dijkstra’s colleagues noted:

> “The Burroughs years saw him at his most prolific in output of research articles. He wrote nearly 500 documents in the EWD series.”

> In this specific case study we see hints of a general observation about slow productivity. Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

So management was incompetent in not seeing this dude was prolific when thinking at home.

But as with almost anything: it depends. Some people are work better from home, other do better in an office. All these return to office policies are BS IMHO: as long as the people you directly work with are OK with you working from home, go do that.

Yes, even then management was incompetent.

People have worked remotely, seldom or never seen "in the company chair", while being more productive than people in offices by orders of magnitude...