No, I don't believe it does. The argument is actually that they "care about control over labour and stock prices" above all else, including productivity.
> The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).
From the article: "Home offices also lower office real estate costs, so you’d think executives would love it, but they also makes employee surveillance harder."
And life was disproportionately more difficult for more junior folks.
WFH was far from an unalloyed good that only got abandoned "because it made surveillance harder".
Would it be possible to salvage WFH? Maybe. At a bare minimum, it'd require rapidly firing the abusers. And spending a lot more on helping juniors grow.
In a lot of businesses you get praise and look important if you’re responsible for leading a large group of highly paid employees, more so then if you have a smaller team.
Thus the motivation is frequently to spend as much money as possible, not to improve efficiency.
If you improve efficiency then maybe you just get your team size cut and people ask hard questions about why you needed all those resources in the first place.
Maybe things were different in the days of zero APR free money being thrown left and right at companies to keep growing, but I don't think we'll see a return to that any time soon.
SWE salaries are a massive cost. Improving productivity is one way of offsetting that cost. The examples provided for "don't care about productivity" are things like open office plans- where a certain amount of productivity is sacrificed while offsetting a different cost (building space).
Yes, it is fair to say that managers and executives do not care about productivity to the exclusion of all else. It's something of a pointless statement, though, as I don't think anyone actually thinks that.