Socialism is hinged upon making it harder for people to get ahead. If you get too far ahead, your gains are redistributed to those who you have left behind. By that definition, a pure Socialist system will ensure that nobody can ever get ahead of anybody else.
> I think you're hitting on a bigger problem with American culture, which is the "hard working" bias. Is the employee who comes in at 7am and leaves at 7pm really a better person?
Ask this a different way: is the athlete who comes to the gym at 7am and leaves at 7pm really a better athlete? The answer is, of course, yes. Sports are 100% meritocracies. You either perform, or you do not. The color of your skin, the disabilities you have, the socioeconomic status you grew up with; none of those things factor in. You can either perform better than the opposition, or you cannot. Full stop.
There are very few people that would dispute that, yet for everything outside of sports there's a subsection of the population that has convinced themselves that hard work somehow doesn't equal success. Maybe it's because it's harder for people to relate to entrepreneurial success than it is to relate to success in a sport because the metrics for sports are very well defined.
So if that's the case, to answer your question directly, we need to define the metric for success. In business, that's called profit. The hard working employee is a "better person" (your words) if their work results in greater profit for the company than the person coming in the bare minimum amount of time. If not, then yes, they're wasting their time just like the Athlete would be if their hard work didn't result in better performance in their sport.