I recently worked for a company that expected employees to stay well pass 5pm. I was personally working 13 or 14 hours a day and having to occasionally volunteer my time on weekends. My salary in comparison to hours worked went down significantly.

Anyway, I did what most of the men described in the article did. I learned how to work without working. It was easy to copy the kind of workaholic appearance expressed by many of my peers.

The strange thing was that most everyone was pretending. Everyone was just lying. It was like there was some secret unwritten rule that we should pretend instead of talking about the obvious elephant in the room. Which was that we were asked too much of us and that needed to change.

When I was first starting out (way before I took that job) I was told that the idea is to "manage perception" and that appears to be true of a few places.