If nobody does anything, nothing is delivered and nobody gets paid.
If you don't want to work, don't take a job.
I don’t know if you’re conflating these things because the article poorly laid out its premise, or because you’re sympathetic to the demanding expectations you’ve participated in, or because it was so traumatic you see in your own right laziness where people are merely enjoying the fruits of their labor without toiling for other people’s fruits. In any case, I sincerely wish you recovery from any remaining burnout. And I sincerely invite you to have solidarity with others who don’t want to experience the severity of overwork we have, and to defend them in rejecting cultures of overwork rather than defending caricatures of workers who would be just as harmed if they were in our position.
If you don’t want to be overworked, don’t drive excessive work for those who’d benefit at your expense.
I can’t say I’m sympathetic to your analysis at all. I don’t blame any of my coworkers who were able to work according to their actual express duties and not beyond, not one bit. I find it appalling that anyone would describe that as “sociopathy”, even in colloquial terms. With few exceptions, people are employed by organizations explicitly designed to extract as much value from every resource—human or otherwise—for as little expense as possible. And they’re employed or managed by people who either benefit from that or reinforce it. Speaking of colloquial (albeit wrong) use of the term “sociopathy”, that sure sounds like a perfect fit to me.
Even if someone extends their effort just a little bit and it’s not traumatic in the way you and I have experienced, they’re generally trading part of the most precious thing they’ll ever have, time, to enrich someone else at their expense.
The point of fulfilling your duties, and doing no more, isn’t to “hurt the corporation”, it’s to protect yourself from being harmed by it as you and I have. This is, curiously, where I find myself more philosophically at odds with the article than I think you are. The article advocates for quietly acquiescing to the fact of exploitative work expectations by quietly sneaking some semblance of not being exploited. You advocate for more people sharing the burden of being exploited, more evenly. Maybe Homer Simpson and America are wrong, and a healthy organized labor movement which prioritizes solidarity between workers, at the expense of employers and management where their priorities are harmful is a better compromise with reality than either “hope I don’t get caught doing my job and only my job” or “I’m destroying my life because my peers aren’t willing to destroy theirs along with me”.
The buck does have to stop somewhere. Why does it have to stop with the people who will likely suffer as we've suffered? Why are they the focus of ire and not the expectation that they sacrifice themselves too?