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Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of labor practices that most software developers would agree on changing: unpaid overtime, unreasonable on-call requirements, lack of transparency in equity compensation, unreasonably short windows for exercising vested stock options after leaving the company.

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Thanks to the Fair Labor Standards Act, anyone who is a software engineer is exempt from overtime pay as long as they make at least $455/week on a salary basis.[1] Hint, I don't know any software engineers making less than $23660/yr.

It's a heinously stupid regulation, and it's one which was lobbied for heavily by the tech industry to reduce labor costs. But that is the federal law of the US currently, which means yes you can be required to perform unpaid overtime.

[1]: https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf

Not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with the person above, but just to clarify: the FLSA doesn't prevent tech workers from collectively bargaining to gain paid overtime as a condition of employment, it just determines the highest wage at which salaried workers are required by law to be paid overtime (which I agree is stupid, and should be a benefit all workers receive).

Yes, I'm aware. That's why I pointed it out as something that a union could change.

Note that you can cease to be exempt if your employer begins treating you as if you were hourly and not salaried --- for instance, docking your pay in small increments, for instance because you went on strike for half a day.

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