As others have pointed out, working longer hours is actually counterproductive. The 40 hour work week and paid vacations were not introduced out of kindness, they were introduced because employers found out that they actually improved overall productivity.
However, particularly in highly cognitively demanding fields, even 40 hours is likely too much, actual productive work is more around 20-25h per week at best. If you try to do more, you will accomplish less.
> eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status.
Yes. If you continue to do the same things in the same way, you will definitely be uncompetitive. As you grow and grow older, you should be accumulating at least knowledge and hopefully a little bit of wisdom.
As the old joke goes: "One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999."
Meaning you have to find ways to leverage your hopefully increasing abilities to shift into jobs/roles where you provide more value. Like bringing architectural oversight to teams/projects, mentoring, answering questions. If I can prevent a more junior developer from spending a day or two chasing down a blind alley by giving a couple of minutes of advice, that's pretty valuable. And scalable, because I can give a few minutes of advice to a whole bunch of developers over a given workday.
Or if I manage to introduce an architecture that reduces code by say 50% while at the same time making the code simpler, I've just doubled the team's productivity, with likely more compounded savings in the future.
The 40 hour work week was introduced because workers demanded it (in the US I'm not sure about other countries). The first strike in North America was workers demanding a shorter work day.
As others have pointed out, working longer hours is actually counterproductive. The 40 hour work week and paid vacations were not introduced out of kindness, they were introduced because employers found out that they actually improved overall productivity.
However, particularly in highly cognitively demanding fields, even 40 hours is likely too much, actual productive work is more around 20-25h per week at best. If you try to do more, you will accomplish less.
> eventually become overpaid and uncompetitive status.
Yes. If you continue to do the same things in the same way, you will definitely be uncompetitive. As you grow and grow older, you should be accumulating at least knowledge and hopefully a little bit of wisdom.
As the old joke goes: "One chalk mark $1; Knowing where to put it $49,999."
Meaning you have to find ways to leverage your hopefully increasing abilities to shift into jobs/roles where you provide more value. Like bringing architectural oversight to teams/projects, mentoring, answering questions. If I can prevent a more junior developer from spending a day or two chasing down a blind alley by giving a couple of minutes of advice, that's pretty valuable. And scalable, because I can give a few minutes of advice to a whole bunch of developers over a given workday.
Or if I manage to introduce an architecture that reduces code by say 50% while at the same time making the code simpler, I've just doubled the team's productivity, with likely more compounded savings in the future.