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Comment by vanadium | Hacker News Reader

In most companies I've been exposed to, it's the _minimum_ expected effort for the 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.

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>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.

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.

My old job started requiring frequent work on remote sites. I was originally paid a bonus hourly rate while away (in lieu of my salary for those days), and they tried to move me from that setup to a slightly higher base salary but no extra pay for remote work.

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.

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).

We're not in the U.S. and my friend has since moved on to much greener pastures. I don't know the specifics of his employment contract but I believe software development is one of the roles specifically exempted from "reasonableness" requirements for overtime where I live. It was still a crappy thing to do to him (and made me feel totally vindicated in my initial cynical attitude to the whole thing.)

And everytime we start new jobs we're like "ok I'm doing 9 hours days max," but that never lasts.

In other countries it is illegal to work that much without being a manager.

More accurately, for Europe it would be illegal except for the business owner. A normal manager is still convered by the limit.

(Actual limit is 48h/wk, averaged over several weeks.)

I have worked probably 20 days over 8 hours in my 10 year career. My team hardly ever works more than 8 hours these days.

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.

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