[d4nt]

Having worked with a few large IT services companies, I’d question their definition of “productivity”. I suspect it’s related to Jira tickets completed or short term revenue (eg billable hours). I doubt it’s measured in terms of end user outcomes.

My experience of these large IT services companies is that their middle management is very focused on maximising profitability for the work their engineers are doing. To the point that they hold engineers back from doing the “right” thing. Eg “don’t add logging to this new feature - it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the change request”. You could argue this correct from a purist capitalist perspective of course. But that just underlines my belief that outsourcing IT to outside services providers is always more expensive in the long run.

For me, the fact that remote working lessens the influence of middle management is a feature not a bug, even if it hurts the large IT Services provider business model.