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Comment by yostrovs | Hacker News Reader

Amazing that they have 44,000 managers

They use the term manager for lots of roles that don't actually have any management function. I worked on a team within Verizon that had ~40 people, all of whom were considered managers, even though none of us, other than the two actual managers, had any people under us.

For those who may not know, companies do this so they can classify as many workers as possible as "exempt employees" meaning they are exempt from overtime pay and other worker protections.

"In general, to be considered an “exempt” employee, you must be paid a salary (not hourly) and must perform executive, administrative or professional duties."

https://www.thebalancecareers.com/exempt-and-a-non-exempt-em...

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that these employees couldn't be considered administrative or professional without a managerial title.

Edit: reading further, this clarifies a bit: "These categories are purposefully broad to encompass many types of jobs. However, it is the tasks performed on the job, not the job title alone, which determine exempt vs. non-exempt employment status." Essentially, it's not entirely a cop-out by companies to avoid worker protections.

This is emphatically the case. The administrative and IT exemptions are rankly abused. It's not only big / tech companies that engage in this practice, either -- so many folks work for middling-or-less salary and expected to put in uncompensated overtime. Companies craft HR policy to shoehorn practically every full-time position into an exempt class.

Yeah, I worked at a public school district where everybody who was neither hourly, nor a teacher, nor someone high in administration qualifies as a "manager". Pretty much the entire IT team was coded as a manager. It really just meant "salaried, 12-month, no overtime, non-instructional employee". Outside IT most of the people actually did manage people, though.

Is this a tax thing? I've seen this at a few big old guard software companies. It confused the hell out of me coming from startups and seeing the guys next to me were all VPs/Managers (in the Engineering aisles).

It's a labor law thing.

I'm your run of the mill srSWE just like them, they'd just been around 5-15 years. I've been non-exempt my entire career as a neteng/syseng/swe, etc. Do you mean something else? I assumed it was something like X amount of mgrs/VPs on staff = some benefit (taxes, etc).

https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf

Feel free to email me (contact info in profile) if you want to discuss further.

I work at AT&T. “Manager” here means, basically, “not unionized” - so basically not technicians, call center agents, or retail store workers. “Supervisor” is the term of art for “has people under them”.

Had a friend at a yuuuge company (comparable to Verizon) and their title changed as they spent more time with the company w/o their role or responsibilities changing a lot throughout the years.

After 7-8 years at the given company this friend of mine became a "VP" and first I was "WOW, look at you!", but then he explained that he is doing the same sh*t, maybe a tad bit more, but this is how they get their promotions, etc... so they had tons of "Managers" and "VPs"...

Bank of America?

Not quite, but you got the "financial institution" part right :)

I started my career as a programmer at AT&T and was "management" on day one, despite no managerial responsibilities. The term means nothing more than "non-union employee."

And want to lose them!

what do they all do? I imagine regional/vertical sales or procurement roles from the before-internet scale era?

They're programmers, data architects, analysts, some actual managers, and so on. It just means "non-union employee."

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