Isnt't a salary just a predefined quota of hours and rate?
It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position.
You'd be surprised how illuminating that's been to those Juniors, and how much of an imprint it left on those folks as they progressed in their careers. A lot of people in our industry genuinely don't recognize how much they devalue themselves and diluting their hourly rate when they're putting in 60-80 hours a week.
My dept. is considering moving us from hourly to salary. I've expressed that I don't mind that as long as we get a pay increase equalling expected overtime. Let's see how that plays out.
Of course, while they were quite happy with capping the amount they were paying me (at less than even my existing salary-plus-site-bonus), they always refused to accept a limit (any limit at all, not just one I felt reasonable) on the number of weeks a year I was expected to be away.
Eventually I left and a friend of mine accepted their deal, he ended up racking up 400 hours of overtime (which he never got to take or got paid out) in his first three months.
An employment lawyer and/or the Department of Labor would be very interested in this. It takes more than simply putting someone on salary to exempt them from overtime (in the US).
(Actual limit is 48h/wk, averaged over several weeks.)
Depends what you do, but if you're a "normal" software company you should be able to get away with this. Work smartly - don't waste a bunch of time, recognize how much actual work your people can do in a day - and let them go home to recharge.
But lower-base-pay non-exempt employees sometimes are quoted a salary but with terms that make it a predefined quota of hours and rate that is in practice more like an hourly rate; these positions usually have paid leave so that, unless the leave is exhausted, it mostly only differs from a pure salary in that overtime is paid, either at straight, time-and-half, or double pay, depending on labor law and contract terms.
That depends on one's employment contract.
Funny how it only goes one way. Not many employers are OK with someone taking Friday off because they got their work done early. Lots of employers will see nothing wrong with asking people to come in on the weekend. I think people forget that the employer/employee relationship is a value for value business relationship. As a professional I'm flexible but I'm not exploitable.
But for some reason rush hour starts just after noon on Fridays (at least in the bay area). So many employers seem to have some flexibility.
Taking a salary means you are being responsible for what you achieve, not just mindlessly churning out the required number of hours.
Taking a salaried work means you are being responsible for the well-being of your employees, not just mindlessly handing out fixed amounts of money.
I'm paid a certain amount to do a job, with technically unspecified hours, although with the cultural expectation that it'll be 40 hours per week. If I'm going to spend a few hours with a customer (presumably part of my job, in this hypothetical situation), I'll expect some flexibility next time I've got a couple hours of errands to run during the week.
I'm not so worried about one-off occurrences, but I'll take exception if I start to see a pattern of my hours inching up. 42 hours a week? Doesn't sound like much (24 minutes a day). What do you think would happen if I asked for a 5% raise for 5% more work? Right now, my manager would tell me that we don't have the budget, and his manager would start probing around to see how to spread out my current workload to other employees.
Staff attorneys / in-house counsel are generally salaried and work as described above.