I had a guy work for me once, I was trying to transition him from hourly to salaried. He had some longer weeks prior to this, and made the assumption that this would always be the case. He said, "I don't want to do this, because I will make more money this way."

Sounds like the article, right?

Except ... this extra time was a very temporary scenario, and he would be getting benefits, an effective hourly raise, etc. Even more to the point, when we didn't need his services ... and he didn't grasp this part, we wouldn't bring him in and pay him, though, as a salaried person, I would expect he would be doing self-education while we had "down" time, so he'd increase his value and utility to the organization.

Basically, I was trying to provide value to both the company and to him. As we were a very small company, I was able to see the value aspect very clearly, and I made the bet (later proven wrong as it turns out) that he would make a stronger contribution to the company if he had a steady source of income, with less worries about billable hours.

The big reason why he was getting more hours was that he was helping us set up our lab space. That project was almost complete ... maybe 2 more weeks of longer weeks, after which ... we'd need him 25%-50% time at best. I did need someone with expanded skills that he didn't have, and thought (mistakenly) that I could grow this particular individual into that role ... he expressed a strong interest in it.

The incentives aren't usually well aligned in BigCo and employee. We are, effectively, cannon fodder, for their plans, up through and including the senior exec ranks. Your incentive alignment with the corporation varies inversely as some power of the distance from the strategic decision making.

In SmallCo and employee, there are typically better alignments, though still not perfect. For someone like me, an entrepreneur CEO/CTO at the time, I was looking to build a culture, an environment, where we took a long view, beyond the next billable event. Where value took time to grow, where we cultivated it, where we grew people into roles that they wanted but might not have been able to do at the time.

The problem is, when you are sufficiently removed from the decision making process, your alignment is entirely economic. When you can't impact outcomes, and gain professional satisfaction and positive reputation from helping to steer a better course, your focus is, correctly, on other matters that benefit you personally.

To a large extent, this is the way things work. What benefits you personally and professionally, and is the compensation, work, and culture, aligned to mutually maximize the value of all of these things. In the case of the OP, no, the compensation was specifically architected to minimize cost to the BigCo, and maximize the benefit to the big co, even at the expense of the employee. Which would, undoubtedly, negatively impact the culture, and the way the employees interact with BigCo.

I am sorry to say this is to be expected ... but it isn't the first time I've heard this type of story.

For me personally, I remember working for some small silicon valley outfit in the 90s, where they treated some of the specialist developers like crap, but paid the contractors something like triple the hourly rate to use their expertise. So, a fairly sizeable cohort of my colleagues resigned, formed small consulting groups, and were hired back at (then) outrageous rates to do effectively the same work.

This misalignment is manifest in many large Cos.