

I’m super unproductive when I work remote. I don’t attend all my meetings, I average about 0.4 MRs per day, and probably only 10 lines of code. I make lazy post-development tickets just to check the box. I sometimes take hours to respond to messages, and I frequently end my day at only 5-7 hours worked.
Mysteriously, none of those things is a good way to measure productivity for software development, and mandating that everyone look like they’re working hard does not ensure optimal creative problem solving.
Only about 10% of the working population in the US is in manufacturing, so 20% more people that would want to work in manufacturing is quite a lot. It’s impossible to undo the automation that has happened to date, though. Worse, if more people work in manufacturing, the pressure on wages and the pressure to automate can both increase.
Even if we stop all imports and make every finished good purchased in the US here, it’s far from enough to bring us back to the historic levels of employment in manufacturing.