I simply can't work the kind of hours that I could ten years ago. I find this is true in two ways; not only do I have better things to do now than donate free

I simply can't work the kind of hours that I could ten years ago. I find this is true in two ways; not only do I have better things to do now than donate free overtime to my employer, I am far better at not needing to. My best work in recent memory involved reading and thinking and sketching for a day and a half, and then adding six characters and a space to the front of one line of code; a decade ago, there is a real chance I would have ploughed into the problem with rewrites and architecture changes and all sorts of bad ideas. This does not solve the perennial problem that a less-skilled programmer thrashing away for days appears to be doing a lot more for the company than someone who sits unmoving for a morning and then strokes the code with a feather.