Everyone knows people who waste time in the office, however your generalization not withstanding, the only folks I know who think the only reason people put in more than 40 hours is because of laziness are execs and middle managers.
A lot of folks put in a lot of hours to make up for understaffing and frankly, flat out management incompetence. Poor management is the number one reason for long hours in my experience, bar none.
Of course the managers are never the ones who have to do the long hours due to their ineptitude, but they make damned sure their superiors think those “lazy malcontents” that raise their issues up to them about the mismanagement of the project are viewed as just lazy whiners.
Exactly - many years ago - I worked for the most ‘successful’ high tech firm in NE - their strategy, which they proudly announced to customers - was to provide employees with home computers (and other ‘goodies’)so they could ‘extend’ the workday, and they would just ratchet up the workload to make it happen. If anyone couldn’t adjust or objected, well new, younger, cheaper workers were always around to replace them.
It worked. Of course, the company eventually failed - and was absorbed by their biggest rival(which had its own set of problems which almost destroyed them) - executive management, including the founding ‘genius’, all had beautifully rich golden parachutes!
Middle management are usually the people I see putting in the most pointless OT, everybody knows middle management are expendable so they make themselves appear indispensable. Of course that’s a mistake because it also makes them unpromotable.
People pulling the major hours because of understaffing and management incompetence fall into my category 1: suckers. Putting in those hours does nothing other than allow the manager to succeed inspite of his stupidity, nothing will change then. Goal #1 in that situation needs to be to get out.