IT Professional here,
I've been working for a company for around 7 years and I can confirm without a doubt that working hard only gets you more work and less pay.
For the first 1-3 years I killed myself. Showed up to work an hour early every day, consistently doing more and more every day. Never took time off, personal or vacation, everything was scheduled around work. This whole time I was making roughly $11-13 an hour.
The next two years we had a massive company overhaul, mass layoffs, and hiring, my department grew by a few and I thought I could finally grow into a role I was killing myself for.
Wrong.
What did happen though was watching the new hire sleep at their desk, routinely show up late, take extra long lunches, cause chaos in our environment with no accountability, and lastly implement half-baked solutions then drop the projects halfway through anyway. The kicker? He was hired at twice my pay.
For the last few years I have slowly been automating my job, reducing the projects I take, pushing off work to our interns, and in general, doing less so much to the point I'm bored. Magically I get a pay jump from $13 an hour to $20 over the course of that two years.
So where am I at today?
Salary position, my own office, hand picking what projects I feel like doing at a snail's pace, no stress, no care, and a youtube history list a mile long.
Corporate America is so broken it's not funny.