The abstract did say the result is mixed. You have "long term" increase in human capital development...primarily because connections help mentor more junior developers, but output is reduced...for obvious reasons.
The "output is reduced" especially for certain crunches where time is of the essence IS an argument for WFH in those circumstances, and for me, when I need the most time alone.
That's up to you, but context matters and that simply isn't the title. That finding too is not well supported by the article, sample size = 1 and the company they looked at is not exactly a typical company either. Imnsho this paper is very low quality.
It is entirely possible that these conclusions (which by themselves are not all that shocking or novel) hold true over larger samples and across multiple types of company but that's not what they did. They looked at one entity:
"We study the impact of sitting together in the office for software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer. This firm gave us access to the online feedback that engineers write about each other’s computer code as well as metrics of engineers’ programming output. "
So they base the entirety of this conclusion on code review comments and lines-of-code produced or something like that. That makes the conclusion even less supported than if they had done some actual research.
For a statement like this to hold you would at least need a control and a larger sample.
> Imnsho this paper is very low quality
Compared to like a phase 3 clinical trial, sure. Compared to your average paper, and especially your average business paper I don't think that's the case.
The abstract says one thing, the title here suggests an entirely different thing. Besides that not-so-subtle editing, I also find the sample size used more than a little bit lower than one that you could draw such a sweeping conclusion from.