If I can be extremely frank, you don't HAVE to force someone gullible enough to do it willingly.

And though this is conjecture on my part, even if you find refactoring and rewriting interesting, if you had the 50 hours back from doing these things and were instead rewriting and refactoring your own personal projects, I suspect you'd be equally as happy and would be something like 30x as likely to get fair remunerations for your work, rather than either enjoying the pittance they're going to give you or feeling the eventual heartbreak when they realize you're demanding a lot of money and they could just hire another passionate drone to pick up where you left off.

Yeah, on a personal note, I do actually wish I had more time for my own stuff. And I'm not so sure I could get up to 90 again these days :)

But the point is, even if working 90 hour weeks was a stupid thing to do, for better or worse it positioned me to negotiate more pay. Not because the company somehow had a fetish for long-hour workers, but because of what I learned during those hours. Is there a real way to prevent that? If not, is part of the pay gap inevitable?

Heh. I no longer enjoy 90 hours a week (I was doing that 20 years ago), but I love refactoring / rewriting. In fact, when this contract ends, I should really look for one where refactoring is the main thing to do.