No doubt. They are hard workers, hustlers (in the best sense of the word), scammers, grifters, and some of the laziest folks I've ever met -- and everything in between.

They're just people. When the upper-classes talk about the poor as all good or all bad it's always in the context of selling you their politics.

There’s a difference between working hard and working smart. One is the brute force solution. The other uses a heuristic to narrow the solution space.

I think the point here is that in white-collar workplaces long hours are mostly an abstract way of signaling that you take the job seriously, not exhausting in the way that long hours in a job demanding physical labor would be.

There are different kinds of tired — physically exhausted, brain-fried, and emotionally spent — but I’m not making any sort of comparison between them.

Yeah, but the guy who always stays after at work, how much of his time is work and how much of it is browsing Reddit?

Fair question. Is that person slacking, projecting, coping, or percolating?

They’re signaling to management. Plain and simple.