I used to slave away hanging dry wall (lol child labor laws), and then worked as a waiter. Now I work in big tech, and let me tell you the amount of people slacking off during work is incredible. Not that they necessarily should be working themselves to death, but with respect to the article, there's a lot of low hanging fruit.

Wall St. is a sort of special type of pathology due to the sheer amount of high frequency, arbitrary deadlines that must be met. What's worse is that the work is incredibly repetitive and boring. A buddy at GS showed me what they did and it's incredibly dry. Literally Excel docs, pivot tables, slide decks. It's not even creative. Ironically they recruit top tier students (well, as much these days, but still) from Harvard, Stanford, etc. You can tell they're just putting in the work to eventually go work at a Hedge Fund or whatever.

There's certainly diminishing returns, but I'd say the average engineer at Big Tech has not reached that point. That being said, it's hard to care when said companies are making 5-12X your salary in profit, and projects keep getting shuttered and requirements are changing and there's a bunch of delays due to bureaucracy, lol.

In some ways I actually think it's better if everyone is lazy as it quickly reveals what's important. The problem with everyone acting busy is that it can be hard to tease out what's meaningful.