Why not point to actual flaws in the methodology then? It’s a really interesting a very hard to run piece of research. Inevitably it will be flawed because tight real world experiments in economics are hard/impossible.

I mean... there are basically no robustness checks.They only had a pre- and post-intervention comparisons with no random comparison group for a counterfactual. They asked retrospective questions. There are multiple poorly documented interventions. The analysis of the non-positive responses is extremely limited and what does exist draws conclusions that reek of confirmation bias. Their response rate for surveys appears to be crap which brings up questions of sampling bias. There is a strong appearance of cherry-picking. The descriptive statistics are extremely lacking - no confidence intervals, standard deviation, etc. - giving an appearance of p-hacking.

> Of course employee are going to report happy

isn't this also about the firms loving it? If it's a win/win for both sides, what's the problem?

Sadly it's a reflection of this reporting. They quote exactly 1 of these leaders and couch the failures with suggestions of a failed methodology.

Just curios, why single-out HN crowd though???. In a typical 'HN crowd' comment, it is usually about a persona that think 'tech is great' or 'tech can solve all problems', not this particular characterization of 'worker vs management'.

The HN crowd tends to have unrealistic views of money and employment, probably partly because software development is an unusual job - extremely well paid for relatively little work and responsibility - and partly because the kinds of people on HN are surprisingly naïve when it comes to economics (and also people; but that's not surprising).

Some examples:

* Never-ending optimism about UBI, despite the maths clearly not working. Kind of similar to this really.

* Expecting salary to exactly match value - i.e. to get the same pay remote working no matter where you live. The number of people here that fundamentally don't understand that salary is a supply/demand negotiation is weird. And they really don't think it through to the obvious conclusion if it did happen - they'd get paid the same as people in Eastern Europe or India.

I think a 4-day work week could eventually happen, but HN types like to pretend it will make people more productive which it absolutely won't. It probably won't reduce productivity to 80%. More like 90%. But it will happen as a cultural shift; not because it increases productivity.