Learned the hard way in my early 20s. Now I only put in the extra hours when the site is down, I’m on pager duty, and we’re losing 100k+ dollars every few minutes. I’m friendly and very organized. I manage my own Jira board and let my boss know when we need more people on a project. Definitely not a programming wizard but boy can I get two different departments working together.
I've done a couple of 50-60h stints in my career for rolling out a big project globally or things like that and I was... absolutely... exhausted and drained.
I couldn't think straight, I was being rude to people I love.
To think that people can actually put this amount of hours constantly (am talking 60h!!!) is mind blowing. Maybe my brain is just different and it can't do more than the regular hours.
The company I work has a lot of very eager and smart people who put 40h a week and have families. They are experts in their field of work (Image processing).
I would say I have been climbing the ladder because I have good soft-skills and strong leadership skills. It happened naturally and was not part of an evil plan or something I tried too hard.
I am OK with not being a programming wizard or using all the latest tech in every project. I am very good in getting people to work together productively and having them delivering projects constantly.
I have gone from Senior to Lead in the past two companies I've been at within 6 months and now am now growing a department.