[penguat]

The answers already here address the direct effect in terms of company costs - there are fixed costs of an employee as well as variable costs.

I am more interested in what it does to your typical team in your something-like-typical corporate environment: I think it would tank team productivity. Instead of programmers getting up to maybe 6 hours' writing software done, programmers would get significantly less time doing that. And we would all hate it.

This effect would happen because a) there are interruptions, and communications overheads to being part of a team; and b) because you need a bigger team to cover the reduced productivity, all of your things that scale poorly with the size of a team mean you need an even bigger team, with each person therefore doing less development.

I think companies which are smart about this whole building software thing are more interested in teams and their capabilities than individuals and their capabilities, and I think many of those would look at this in the same way as I just did.