Are you glossing this for the sake of narrative simplicity, or do you categorically disagree?
edit: speeling gud
There are any number of things you can do to lock in your current level of compensation while systematically lowering your effort. You can:
* Get faster at producing the outcomes the business is looking for; the easiest way to do this is often to examine your entire work product, spend cycles to isolate the bits that the company is actually valuing, and stop wasting time producing things the company doesn't truly value. A less effective but more time-honored (by geeks) approach to this strategy is "automation".
* Take steps to pivot your role in the company to one that produces outcomes the company values similarly to your current one, but that require less effort on your part.
* Take steps to gradually lower the bar on what's expected of you.
You didn't ask me, but I categorically disagree with the idea that hard work correlates to better pay in a typical company.
This is not to say that I like that state of affairs - I agree with Keynes when he says "Nothing corrupts society more than to disconnect effort and reward." The fact that in the average company, effort and reward are distantly and indirectly related, I claim is a major, major, social and moral problem. That state of affairs corrodes the rule of law and attacks the stability of a society. Stability is a prerequisite to entrepreneurs getting interesting things done - remember the recent article here about Argentinian entrepreneurs and the crippling effects of a currency that collapses every decade or two? Stability means, to pull from PG's essays again, that honest accumulations of wealth won't be plundered. Stability of that sort is a prerequisite to rewarding entrepreneurship - and that sort of stability is disappearing in the US, generally on account of the very same people who are responsible for disconnecting effort and reward at typical corporations. The financier class (and the political class that they have purchased - in this regard, the last four US Presidents are clones of one another) is eating everyone's seed corn. That's deeply harmful to those of us who want to have our labor judged by the market, because without stability and the rule of law, it is impossible for markets to operate efficiently.
Seriously, how many 100 person companies does it take to be as capable as IBM?
So to alter the question: how to improve compensation in a hypothetically well-managed company, without busting 60-hour weeks?
* Analyze what you do, figure out the portion of it that your employer cares about, and stop spending so much time on the other portions. Example: the carefully crafted prose in your per-public-method comments might be permitted to suffer.
* Instead of campaigning for a raise, campaign for a role change to something that uses more of your cleverness and less of your sweat. For instance, maybe you'd be better off as a product manager.
* Sandbag estimates to bring unrealistic expectations back into line.
My person rule of thumb for this is to take the time I originally estimated, double it, then add a little more, especially if it's 8 hours or greater.
I am - of course in a business sense - very interested in raising my market value to my current (and future employers), and am always looking for ways to enhance it.
My hypothesis of how this came about is (a) they hired me because there was a certain problem (involving one of those Perl scripts that gives Perl a bad name) they needed to solve; (b) once that problem was solved, they had trouble finding something else for me to do whose benefit outweighed the cost of bringing me up to speed on the codebase; (c) despite this inefficiency, no sensible middle-manager in a bureaucratic company will choose to reduce his or her own headcount.