It seems like almost everything you’ve described has an alternative description that isn’t about conformity-signalling: employers want employees who are willing to do a lot of work, and if right from the outset you say “I would like to work fewer hours than normal” you are identifying yourself as someone who may not be willing to do a lot of work. So it’s not signalling conformity so much as it’s signalling buy-in to the company’s goals, or submissiveness, or workaholism, or something like that—and obviously employees who are eager to do a lot of work are more valuable (all else being equal) than employees who aren’t. (Which is exactly why that little “work to live, not live to work” speech won’t win their hearts.)
I guess a part of my objection still remains… that unlike the article suggests “human value consumption, which is why they choose to work a lot” it is sometimes more about “employers prefer employees who work a lot (why exactly, that is debated), and in such case employees are only given the options to work a lot or not get the job, with no middle ground”.
If this is about knowledge work, there’s also the problem that each new employee introduces large fixed communication overhead—imagine instead of hiring one employee to work 40 hours a week, you hired 40 employees to work 1 hour a week. Most likely nothing at all would ever get done.
It seems like almost everything you’ve described has an alternative description that isn’t about conformity-signalling: employers want employees who are willing to do a lot of work, and if right from the outset you say “I would like to work fewer hours than normal” you are identifying yourself as someone who may not be willing to do a lot of work. So it’s not signalling conformity so much as it’s signalling buy-in to the company’s goals, or submissiveness, or workaholism, or something like that—and obviously employees who are eager to do a lot of work are more valuable (all else being equal) than employees who aren’t. (Which is exactly why that little “work to live, not live to work” speech won’t win their hearts.)
Yeah, could be any of that.
I guess a part of my objection still remains… that unlike the article suggests “human value consumption, which is why they choose to work a lot” it is sometimes more about “employers prefer employees who work a lot (why exactly, that is debated), and in such case employees are only given the options to work a lot or not get the job, with no middle ground”.
If this is about knowledge work, there’s also the problem that each new employee introduces large fixed communication overhead—imagine instead of hiring one employee to work 40 hours a week, you hired 40 employees to work 1 hour a week. Most likely nothing at all would ever get done.