> I don’t think motivated devs want to go home at 2pm.

That's the beauty of it. Motivated engineers will use the spare time after 2pm to study and improve things. Or run some errands if they have to, without feeling their butt has to be glued to the chair until 6pm.

I've often solved many problems at work in my spare time or when taking a dump or something. It's pretty difficult to really get into deep thinking at the office because of 1. noise and 2. looking unproductive when you actually think hard.

Paradoxically office slackers bashing keyboard when chatting on facebook look more productive from a distance than somebody who actually is deeply thinking about system design and spinning in a chair or staring at a ceiling while doing it.

> I don’t think motivated devs want to go home at 2pm.

I can understand the attitude when one's in their twenties, has no significant other, kids, or other commitments.

Me? I just get tired. I'm very motivated and like what I do, but at some point, it's just silly to stay behind the screen. And sometimes, that point is even earlier than 2pm. That's ok. We aren't machines to be working like a Swiss watch.

I was most productive when my office let us take a few hours a week to exercise. I wouldn't use it if I had anything critical pending, but otherwise I would duck out an hour early several times a week to go get in a good long run (5-10km).

It felt like they had more respect for my time and well-being. When they cut it (with bullshit reasons [0]) "productivity" did not improve in the office. Instead, projects expanded to fill the time. Those 3 hours or so we got to use at the gym before became 3 hours spent to produce the exact same total work. There was zero motivation to utilize it "properly" by using it to get ahead on anything. Every project continued to hit the same deadlines they were hitting before.

[0] One reason I say it was BS, we were typically on or ahead of schedule on projects. Teams that were behind weren't making use of this time while they were behind, they weren't permitted to.

They might let us go home at 2pm but we can't stop thinking about work problems even in the weekends - that's when we get a nice juicy project to think about.