Some tech workers spend only 4 hours a day on productive work: Blind poll

This does not strike me as surprising or problematic, as the choice of headline would suggest.

They specify 4 hours of "focused" work. That seems a perfectly reasonable amount of time to remain in the flow state on an average workday. Email/Slack, meetings, and administrative tasks can easily eat up the rest of the day.

Expecting engineers to churn out 8 hours of raw code/infra/documentation every day is not sustainable or even desirable in most cases.

Seems like a pretty good number all things considered. Probably still better than what you'd get collecting similar metrics on admins, managers, and other white collar roles.

This article seems like the daily anti-tech worker agitprop we're getting right now in an effort to roll back the huge advances in compensation and benefits (specifically WFH) that have been made in the last 3 years.

Yeah, and the other 4 hours having serendipitous chance encounters in the hallway and at the water cooler. As per your stated goal in dragging everyone back to the office.