[bonesss]

> ... much of my long hours were due to my inexperience rather than supernatural productivity.

It takes a fair bit of experience with long days to know that the feeling of doing work and doing 'stuff' pales in comparison with the productivity of doing that work well while rested and focused...

Overtime creates 'undertime', cleaning up tired mistakes takes longer than doing them, and when it comes to coding nothing is worse than wasting 15+ hours implementing something you didn't think clearly enough about to start with, and realizing it was all wasted/could have been done in 1.

> this dedicated early employee surely seemed like she worked 20+ hour days

I feel the discussion of this line is perhaps conflating "worked 20 hour days [on the rare occasion something crazy was happening]", vs "worked 20 hour days [from 0400 hours to midnight every day]". Just because someone worked some 20 hour days does not mean they worked 20 hours every day :)