I believe you were sitting at your desk pressing keys for sixteen hours a day. I also believe you believe you were accomplishing more than you would have at your desk for six hours a day.
It's been shown what actually happens in such a scenario is that your judgment quickly becomes impaired to the point where you are no longer capable of judging how impaired you are; it's the equivalent of being permanently drunk. To be sure, you can still press keys. If the work you're given is far enough below your peak ability, you may even eventually blunder your way into a solution. (Or you may not; last I checked, the failure rate of software projects is still several tens of percent, and stupid hours feature prominently in most of the failures.) But the calendar time to get your job done is longer, not shorter, than it would have been with an intelligent schedule. Degrading yourself like that is nothing to be proud of, and it does nothing but harm to your work as well as yourself.
Absolutely. When I've seen things like this in person, the reality is often, "I worked 16 hour days for 2 months coding, and then spent another 2 months in QA fixing bugs."
People say that like I'm supposed to be impressed, but they don't seem to realize that programmers can be negatively productive. In 10 minutes of stupid, I can put in a bug that soaks up a day of somebody's time later on. But the people proud of their death marches act as if the bugs are all caused by cosmic rays, not their own previous exhausted fumblings, miscommunications, typos, and oversights.
It's been shown what actually happens in such a scenario is that your judgment quickly becomes impaired to the point where you are no longer capable of judging how impaired you are; it's the equivalent of being permanently drunk. To be sure, you can still press keys. If the work you're given is far enough below your peak ability, you may even eventually blunder your way into a solution. (Or you may not; last I checked, the failure rate of software projects is still several tens of percent, and stupid hours feature prominently in most of the failures.) But the calendar time to get your job done is longer, not shorter, than it would have been with an intelligent schedule. Degrading yourself like that is nothing to be proud of, and it does nothing but harm to your work as well as yourself.