> The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't th

> The article points out that both policy in the US and social norms/values have become highly preferenced towards those who work crazy hard. The point isn't that it's bad for certain individuals to value work over everything else, it's that it's bad for society as a whole. Why is it bad specifically? > As you say everyone has different preferences but due to this shift people whose preference isn't to put work/career before everything else are being penalised Imagine you want to remodel your bathroom. Or, also, imagine you have a bad water leak in your bathroom - after all, on-call is one of the major things people in tech complain about with regard to work-life balance. You call up two otherwise similar plumbers, and one tells you that he can be there ASAP to fix your leak, and he'll do the plumbing for the remodel in 2 visits next week. The other is a balanced person so he won't fix your leak until Monday, and he doesn't like to work for a long stretch of time, so the remodel's gonna take 4 visits, sometime next month. Cost's the same, so you hire the 1st plumber. How would you feel if the 2nd one calls you back and complains he's unfairly "being penalised for his preferences"? That's the thing. Everyone (ok, most people) would prefer to hire (or work with) a workaholic, other things being equal. But in abstract, some mysterious "society" should apparently prefer otherwise.