Is Being Salaried a Scam?
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I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack and promptly responding to merge requests, looking as busy as possible. My coworkers who feel the need to work a certain number of hours (40), invariably work overtime every week because their work expands to fit their perceived availability. They all get paid twice as much as me, but if I'm working half the hours is that equal compensation? I say no, because I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.
The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner.
It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it.
To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.
Yes you do. This should be recognized via bonuses, raises, and/or promotions as appropriate. It's not immediate, but it does manifest over time. If it doesn't, use the experience gained to move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately.
Which takes 1-2 years of very hard work to discover, by which time the employee has invested a huge amount of effort for 10-30% more salary and 1-20% more equity than a new hire who has contributed nothing.
And this employee has to wonder why they're contributing so much more when other people are doing almost nothing and getting nearly the same reward. Which leads to the best people quitting and the worst people staying.
Most startups treat "The Senior Leadership Team" like unique people who matter and have to be compensated like they're hard to replace. They get employment contracts, large bonuses of equity/cash, and special treatment. Everyone else gets lip service and the treatment of replaceable cogs in the chain.
For example, the 10x programmer typically gets 10-20% of what an incompetent VP will earn in total comp. Because they're treated like two different classes of employee.
And this fact hurts most companies deeply in ways they'll never understand. It shows up in project delays and huge problems, which ultimately cost far, far more than it would've cost to keep the best contributors.
At nearly every job, I've gotten a raise nearly every year. But the raises generally are very small, 5-10k a year. I'm not going to work nights and weekends for another taxed 5k.
No company I've ever worked at has a bonus system. I would gladly get a feature out in 2 weeks, instead of 4, if it meant a extra $5k check in my bank. Instead, repeatedly doing that for a whole year means a taxed $5k raise at the end.
Not. Worth. It.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours! Out of the people I've worked with, the overlap between working extra hours and having outsize positive impact is smaller than you might expect. Incentivizing extra hours for their own sake would be actively counterproductive.
I'd also say that people generally overestimate the effect of formal financial incentives and underestimate informal social incentives. Company and team culture can have a much larger effect than compensation, especially when everyone is being paid a lot in absolute terms.
This is essentially how the bonus system works at the big software companies. People with the same title might make roughly the same salary, but have very different stock compensation, which gets updated every year based on performance and can be much larger than the base salary. It's why you see such a wide range of numbers on sites like levels.fyi (for example $300K to $900K for a staff engineer at Google).
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
No, no we don’t. I like working just as much as the next person, but I prefer my evaluation to be based on me and my peers working 40 hours, as opposed to me working 40 and them working 60.
Employees, at least a lot of them, ask for bonus systems. They seem to love bonus systems and shun/dislike companies that have a proper bonus system: none.
Bonuses (and other shenanigans) only kills team work and team spirit and make it an everyone against everyone game. And don't tell me that you get too many slackers without a bonus system. Slackers are actually usually pretty good at playing the bonus game, i.e. doing exactly what is required to get the right numbers to get a bonus. Whether that's helping the company or the team in the long run is none of their concern.
Also: you dont have 9 hours of productive work in you a day. Nobody does. You have 4 good hours and then a bunch of wasted time where you are performing being busy because you want everyone to know how smart you are.
> Nobody does.
You are making an overgeneralisation, or assuming a context. For lots of jobs productivity is fairly linear with time - some of those jobs work on piece rates or hourly wages.
Some people are productive for 9 hours in professional jobs, and they are billed accordingly, although maybe the marginal productivity per hour falls.
Not everyone is “wasting time, busy working, and showing off” to paraphrase you.
The jobs that actually are linear actually do tend to get paid by the hour and often even have 1.5x pay for overtime, and the fact that salaried workers don't get that is precisely where the scam is.
I do have an SO and it's not her job to cook and clean for me.
In any case, yeah, 9 hours a day is pushing it for actual productivity.
This is true though it may confuse some who currently do but don’t realize it’s not sustainable and leads to burnout. I used to have 8-9 productive hours a day until I realized the cost. I also have a family now and putting those hours would spend me completely and I’d have nothing left for them. Why in the world would I do that? Even if it was for a lot more money I’d probably do it only for a short period of time with a long break in mind for recouping and tending to what I’d have neglected.
If you’re young and trying to prove yourself and are thirsty to learn and all that sure it works but don’t think this is in any way sustainable.
Only happens when you have equity, you like the work, and you have a lot of it in front of you with no managers or meetings in the way.
But I’ve designed my work so far to be just that. I’d never go back to working on a team or project that wasn’t structured that way. I’m at my happiest when I’m in this zone, it’s the most creative and rewarding work.
This. I'd be happy if I can get 3 solid hours of uninterrupted flow state.
Cant keep it up every day of the year for sure but Ive had days where Ive been productive for 6 - 10 hours.
[1] or 4 day work week or 6 hour work day or whatever suits your life at the moment
So, as I said, I “had” an employee.
Let’s count in jobs. Basically a man fully dedicated to his job 37hrs/week creates about 1 new position a year, every year, because he makes the processes so efficient that we serve 2x more customers, so we can hire. That guy and another intern, they created -1 job in a year (his project brought literally no customer) and cost us 16k€ + his salary + the intern (I pay my interns, I give hefty bonuses to everyone).
I’m not complaining, it’s my job to root out the weed and prune it, and I did a mistake, but you need to understand, as a nation, how many jobs don’t exist because employees live off their colleagues (as for my share, I have created 6 jobs myself so I’ll just collect the huge margins, I’m just vexated he doesn’t collect his margins too). In sectors where everyone thinks it’s not their jobs, people end up harassing each other for the remaining positions. In growing companies, it’s the American dream with free food. The correct middle ground is to own your product for 37 hrs a week, and not delegate questions to be solved by the employer.
Of course, people are different and this is just an anecdote, but from my personal experience (a couple of instances) I can push myself to "fully dedicate" more than 4 hours a day of mentally really hard work - for some months. After that I tell politely that sorry, it is time for me to do something else for a while. More often than not, I have been welcomed back later. Of course, those have been exceptional circumstances, typically there is no need to fully dedicate more than 4 hours of mentally really hard work, but there is some less demanding aspects of the job taking some time off.
For how long can an employee, ever year, double his efficiency and the amount of customers he serves? That just doesn't sound sustainable.
>as a nation
Which nation?
This is a lazy, cop-out answer.
It kind of works if the tasks can be neatly packaged and handed off for totally asynchronous work. It breaks down as soon as you need the part-time person to work with the rest of the team.
You end up forcing the rest of the team to work around one person's schedule. You also end up with someone on your team doubling up on the part-time person's knowledge if you need someone available during normal hours to answer questions or debug something.
It's not really about benefits. ACA doesn't require full benefits for someone working 20 hours a week.
Let's be honest: Many remote work jobs are essentially becoming half-time jobs, with the other half of the work week comprised of simply being available on Slack if someone asks a question.
Why is it that senior employees with a $500K package are expected to take zero vacation time or are subject to disrespect? Why do people pride themselves in taking no vacation, guilting their peer-level leaders in the process? I'd gladly take 11/12 of that pay in return for being able to take a full 4-6 weeks off to myself to do things I want to do in life.
Personal travel, personal project, and family time are important, and that has nothing to do with how much passion I have for the job.
This is precisely why when I started my company I committed to only hiring contract devs for 10-20 hours per week. No meetings. No bullshit. I pay you a high hourly wage, you do as much (often more) work than if you were a salaried 40 hour FTE, and you likely make more money in the process.
The model of work and the 40 hour work week is so fundamentally broken I feel like I'm in a perpetual twilight zone state when I talk to people. They think it's normal and okay to have 3+ hours of meetings per day and barely get any work done. I will never understand it.
My first 7 years of work life outside of college consisted of THOUSANDS of pointless meetings and months of pretending to be busy. I've promised myself I will never do that shit again, and I will not let my business succumb to that style of work.
This is obviously a generalization and of course this may well work great for some companies, including yours.
I don't think that's totally true, it certainly wasn't in my case. I started contracting because I had had enough of the corporate grind. Quite a lot of my peers seemed to have the same attitude.
Played the game to put myself in position to do this, but absolutely weary of it.
"Personal Business Commitments" "Performance Reviews" "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" "Be sure to share stuff about X new project on your social media!" "Submit your vacation request"
Yes, this. All of this.
I will deliver you technical solutions to the best of my ability, and I will do it as well as I can, making sure things are documented, complete and easy to understand for longer term maintainers, using common tech stacks where possible.
I will not corporate pole-climb or waste my life on company admin, nor pretend I believe in your mission.
I look forward to not having to inspire or align people and just tell people "this is what I want".
Their skin in the game is their reputation for repeat work.
What I like about contractors is that good ones will give you suggestions and recommendations for improvement, but they won't make it their life's eternal mission to throw your entire project off track by campaigning for their solution.
What skin in the game does an FTE have? Aside from maintaining benefits, which personally I think is preposterous to tie to full-time employment anyway. What else is there? Stock? Contractors are eligible for stock.
Even so, I don't need anyone to do anything beyond what they've been hired to do. Why would I need someone to go above and beyond? I just need smart, competent workers.
What do you believe employees are in it for?
I actually find that quite offensive. Myself and the other contractors I know are professionals, winning work through reputation and delivering results. That's why we get paid well.
We require less management and always try to deliver above expectations. We have a professional, business to business relationship with our clients, where many employees seem to consider their employer almost a surrogate parent.
Employees have no more skin in the game, in fact I'd say less - if I don't deliver I get no more work.
The better I do, the more money I can make.
Either way, I am trying to take home a certain amount of money, sure. And make enough to cover my insurance needs, yes.
And as a contractor, I was always sensitive to those clients who wanted to make sure I never billed more than 40 hours a week, regardless of how many hours of work I actually did.
Maybe that’s not how contractors are supposed to do things, but that’s a core part of my personality, and not something I can change — or would want to.
Of course, I’ve never been an Amazon warehouse worker, or a driver for Uber or Lyft, so for them I might act differently. But as an IT consultant many times over the past 30+ years, this has been the way I have worked.
My incentive is to make my client happy so they may hire me again, to get a successful project on my resume, and to be able to point future clients to this client if they want to know what I can do for them.
Working, part time, with a remote team and seem to have 3 hours of meetings. How do you do it?
Beyond that, we communicate mostly on GitHub issues, Slack (for realtime issues, goofing off, etc), and P2 for designing things that need more threading/nuance.
We're so distributed (literally around the world) that our one hour meeting is guaranteed to inconvenience someone. When it's my turn, our meeting is at 11pm local time. I usually join with a beer. This meeting is usually a retrospective and just going through what issues we're planning to prioritize for the next few weeks.
We're a very technical team, so we don't have any business specialists on the teams.
The only real downside is finding clients to agree to that limit, but so far it hasn't been too much of a problem.
Why? Lowers weekly management / feedback / “business decisions” needed to enable your work.
For the handful of weeks I've worked every night until 2am, there's 20x as many where I've done a couple of hours work in the morning and then been a paid SME the rest of the day. And seemingly unlike most engineers, I think getting paid to talk to people is FANTASTIC.
You simply cannot do this if you are hourly.
You need to shift the conversation away from hours worked to value of your work.
If you are an hourly employee, you are being paid to be a cog, not to be a brain.
I'm not sure that's really teachable, either. If you can't figure out what moves the needle for a business...
This counts as work to me though?? Like there's something that feels like it's not real work because I'm not writing code, I'm reading it. But it's 100% real actual work; if you weren't doing it they'd have to hire someone else to do it.
I think what the OP just means is that just like keeping slack green and responding to people there, responding quickly to merge requests shows that "you're there" (i.e. "working"). If that's what's required to not get any dumb questions about the rest of his day, that's very smart. As in, it seems that the hours he "works for real" + helping out others on the team/in the org are enough to satisfy his boss that he's doing the work that he's being paid for.
Awesome for him I'd say.
That's the opposite of how it is supposed to work when you are on salary.
You are paid for units of work, which is hours worked.
The output is not what you produced, but what the working force globally produced.
Being salaried means being paid a flat rate (forfait) for being there: sometimes you produce more (you lose), sometimes less (you gain), but the pay stays the same.
Nope, "units of work" is features delivered, bugs fixed, new people trained and so on.
As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day -- this is great and you are getting benefits of being exempt.
Of course sometimes people pay you like you are exempt, but expect you to be present for 40 hours anyway like you are hourly -- and in this case, being exempt is a scam as the article said. But while common, this is far from universal.
Wrong: in a salaried job units of work is hours.
Unless your contract says otherwise.
> As the parent commenter said, if you can do it in 2-3 hours per day
You never do it in 2-3 hours per day, consistently.
If you are that good, don't tell anybody because they will start thinking they are paying you too much.
By that metric, ignoring hair loss, you and your coworkers earn the same per hour.
Let's flip it and measure something else of value. How much free time you have left over.
After all overheads (work, sleep, commute, chores) 1 extra hour worked per day can be a 25% reduction in your free time. What is that worth? How much are you selling that 25% for? Would the overtime or pay rise be worth this?
Sometimes you just need cash in the bank even at a poor exchange rate but I think it's useful to look from different perspectives.
Wise man.
Sure, the occasional late night or weekend is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, but even then your manager should recognise that and let you take some time in lieu.
If you are regularly working 45+ hours a week, your position is under-resourced for what is expected. Talk to your manager. Either the work load needs to reduce, or you need additional people and/or skills/training to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time.
If nothing is done, leave.
If it's a 5 minute call I don't bother with anything official, just have a couple of hours off during the week.
Welll, they did say:
> If nothing is done, leave.
Left a low paying "VP" job because of this. If leadership just wants to squeeze people and work them to death, that's not good leadership.
Best thing they could’ve done, now I have a great job with no expectation of overtime! I do much more effective work too.
- how to apply for a job (write a good cv/resume and cover letter)
- how to deal with finance
- basic cyber security
- critical thinking
I might start thinking that I don’t work fast or good enough. I know this is usually not the case; I try to ignore it and I recommend the same, the impostor syndrome is real and it’s easy to take advantage of it.
There are a number of possible outcomes here: 1: (most likely) you really are good enough, but the expectation is unreasonable 2: you need some help to be good enough. Either training or better tooling. 3: you really aren't suited for the role, in which case it's in everyones interest to find someone more suited to the role.
The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay.
And some places work like that, and when they do it’s mostly fine. When you have that kind of trade-off, that flexibility is a benefit.
But at a lot of places, that flexibility is much more one-way. You’re expected to work the company’s standard business hours at a minimum, plus any additional time it takes to get your job done. If you have to work 45 hours one week, that’s just what’s expected of salaried workers. But if you work 36 hours the next week, you’re going to be charged four hours of PTO (or you’re going to get weird looks and questions about why you left at 1 pm on Friday).
The catch is that for most of us, those conditions are almost never met. When was the last time had a job where the entire backlog of work was cleared out and there were no tasks you could be helping with? Usually if that happens more than a few times, the team is on their way to being reassigned or even laid off.
The 40-hour workweek target is best viewed as a feedback loop. If everyone is consistently working more than 40 hours per week, something is wrong. Team size needs to be increased, schedules need to be pushed out, scope needs to be reduced, inefficiencies (meetings!) need to be pulled out of the way. Something has to give.
Likewise, if someone is consistently running out of work early, the schedule needs to be brought in, the person should help take pressure off of some other tasks, blockers need to be removed, and so on.
The challenge as a manager is that estimation and work-assignment are a two-way process. I work with team members to assign backlog tasks. If someone is consistently taking 20 hours of work for themselves and pretending its a full work week, someone else has to pick up the remaining work.
Reason being, work that gets done requires code-reviews and often communication and understanding within the organization. I personally might have the bandwidth but collectively as a team and an organization, we do not.
And I prefer if my whole team has a little bit of breathing room like this. It means we're rested and prepared to tackle the hard problems and fires that come our way. Nobody burns out. Realistically I don't want anyone putting in more than 32-33ish hours most weeks.
One difficulty is that a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit, but even with that set aside, it seems impossible to pivot to such a world with teams beyond a very small total company size.
Is this sort of work potentially automate-able?
I am a salaried/exempt employee working for a client. My employer charges the client per hour, and theoretically, I am allowed to get paid for the extra hours I work. But my immediate manager won't allow it because the budget is allocated for the year, and if I bill extra hours, there will be a shortage of budget (or at least that's what he tells me). The client manager pushes so much work on to us, entire team is fed up. Last week, we were asked to work from 7 am to 11:30 pm, pretty much non stop. After lunch at 12:30 pm, the only time I got to eat was at 11:30 pm, nearly 11 hours later. From 5 pm, I didn't even get a chance to get up from my seat. I am pretty sure slaves were given breaks to have food. They treat us lower than slaves. Note that this is in addition to the 8-10 hours I have been working for the last 2 weeks (not counting lunch or other breaks).
For what it's worth, I'm a contractor in the UK. I get paid about twice as much a day then a salaried person. I change clients every 3 months to every 2 years. I have 8 months of living expenses in the bank. If a client wants me to do something then fine, but they pay me. I don't get any holiday or benefits, but the extra money makes up for it. Any time off is unpaid, which I feel is how it should be. I had 3 months off at the start of last year when all temp work dried up due to covid, but apart from that, things have been better then ever.
Maybe I just have the personality type for this kind of working arrangement, but it seems like a no brainer to me. You come in on a much more equal level with any client or employer.
I also think this has the added benefit of forcing interview practice and keeping up to date with marketable skills. I really think it's the anti fragile approach.
Please people, take back some contol. Sell your skills at what they are really worth.
This person might have tons of obligations, such as bills to pay, family to take care of, and depending on their location not much mobility to just "find a new job". It's weird to just discount an entire person's life and pretend there's such an easy solution they're not taking.
What's more, it reeks of survivorship bias. There's likely a good chunk of folks who have done what you did but failed (either due to bad luck, or something else). What's more, the price of failure differs for everyone. Some have family to fall back on, others have friends, and others have a societal safety net.
Empathy is hard, but please try and think about how your situation is likely not the norm. By all means feel free to give advice, but try to leave out anecdotal assumptions. Strive to be aware that not everyone has the same opportunities or outcomes, even with the same inputs. It sucks, but that's just life, as you said.
If we assume a tech skill set, more and more jobs are becoming fully remote, making location not so much of an issue.
As for survivorship bias, I feel like you are somewhat right. I actually got into this type of work due to getting fired, so I was already at a low point with not much to lose.
As for empthay, that's exactly what I have and why I made this comment. I'm for the most part totally anonymous here. I don't have many posts or any kind of reputation. I put the time into making the comment because I truly belive that people can benefit from the change in mindset. I have nothing to gain, all I want to do is help people find the kind of freedom from oppressive working situations that I found.
We have all had struggles in our career, and some more than others, but the ones that succeed over the long term usually have the ability to self evaluate and look internally, rather than give an excuse why they can't do something.
It's very common for others to attribute their own failures to something outside their control, but look at others and attribute those people's failures to things inside their control. They also do the opposite for successes. Which I suppose in my own way, I might be doing to yours. But do know I think your success likely took both hard work and luck, and without the hard work it would have likely not panned out.
I disagree that everyone "should be able to put 10% away". It's simply not possible for everyone, and even if they do emergencies happen (car breaks down, sickness, etc.). Once again, you're speaking from a realm of opinion and not reality.
I don't think anyone would disagree that mindset is important, and continuing to try and persevere is important as well. But I do think folks disagree on it always panning out in the end.
Even you, at one point in the future, either due to illness or misfortune, might end up needing more than a shift in mindset to survive or dig yourself out.
Empathy is about more than advice or optimistic mindsets, it's about realizing we should help each other, because sometimes things really are out of our control.
It's about listening to this person, really listening, and understanding their situation before offering platitudes.
I enjoy starting something new every so often, and have got good at rapid onboarding, and contributing from day 1.
The parallel action is quitting. I can understand not wanting to quit without an alternative, but I assume you’re looking?!?
I didn't understand this. Are you talking about budget at your employer, or at your client?
On the flip side, if people don't quit and you succeed in delivering the project, your client manager will claim the credit. And that level of output becomes the new expectation for your team.
At this point you send email to both managers and ask, "so do you want me to limit myself to 8 hours, or should I work overtime" and have them come to a decision.
(A decision might be: "work overtime but lie on your timesheet", in which case you save this email in case you need it for the future wrongful termination lawsuit.)
Another custom here is doing a few minutes of unpaid overtime every day. If you add both things, a full time employee who works from home spends somewhere between 45 and 55 hours at work every week.
Is wage theft still wage theft if it's part of a place's culture? My "hot take" is that it 100% is.
IMHO, yes.
You'd think this is the luck of being in a high demand field - except that low-demand and even competitive fields like construction, teaching, and pretty much everything outside white collar corporate work does not have this brain ownership clause. It seems like anything with "status," trades your brain, which is hilarious, because you essentially become corporate property in exchange for some flattery.
If you need a job, take one, take the money, and use it to get into a financial position where you have bargaining leverage to own your brain and the freedom to use your own hours.
This is very specific to the employer and doesn't have much to do with salaries vs hourly. To jump from there to "salaried is a scam" is a bit too far.
TOIL and on call allowances are not the same as paid OT here.
I'm voting with my feet though. Should be getting a job offer (hopefully!) in the next few days.
Another factor is if you fall sick or can't work as usual for some reason. Australia has laws which make it hard to get fired (unfair dismissal legislation), providing even more security to the salaried.
Corporations try to maximize profits, individuals try to maximize money and free time. Corporations have more power than an individual when trying to bargain. However, corporations don't really care about hours, they care about your performance reviews (though your performance reviews can be easily colored by how much time your reviewers believe you work). I think it would be interesting to see how many people here spend under 40 hr/wk on their full time job.
I have several clients willing to pay my full rate for as many hours as I want to work but they pay me every month on retainer for a small minimum I know pays the bills, and to make sure they have access to my experience when they really need it even if the minimum hours are not always used every month.
If I choose to work a 30 hour week I am paid for 30 hours. Likewise for a 60 hour week.
Lawyers figured out this structure ages ago and I feel like more engineers would benefit from doing the same.
AWS is probably worth $500B today. Twilio is around 10x less at $60B.
Lawson's estimated net-worth is ~$2.5B whilst Jassy's 5x less at ~$450M; and both have been leading their respective businesses since the beginning.
so it cuts both ways.
A junior employee might work 10h/day to figure out a problem/get something working/etc... whereas a senior person may solve the same thing in 1h. This isn't the mythical 10x programmer, it's just experience and knowledge coming out when needed. The one with more knowledge also tends to accelerate their acquisition. One, because they can get the work done so quickly, they have time to keep expanding their knowledge. Two, they have all this groundwork knowledge which makes it easier to expand on.
So while it may look like your friend only 'works' for 1h/day, you could be missing all the time spent so that your friend could finish the work in only 1h.
There is a lot of slack in the corporate economy which became more transparent under wfh.
Sure, but that's nothing new. When I was younger I worked in a big corp type job. After a few weeks I noticed this older guy would go play tennis at lunch a few times/week, and then take a nap under his desk afterwards. Normally, he would then leave around 3pm. One day after this happened, I ask someone what's this guys deal. Turns out, he's the only one who knew how to work on system XYZ. Others had some vague idea in case this guy was hit by a bus, but he did 99.9% of the work on this system. Also turns out, it didn't need a lot of work done.
There are different ebbs and flows to each type of work, so it's worth trying both for folks to see what they like. Job hopping for raises works for some people, but it also seems to lead to a lot of churn and lower expectations of trust and loyalty for salaried employees in the tech industry. Not my style. A business cutting edge-to-edge with another business is a more reciprocal arrangement, but there are some downsides and more stress.
- Clients who pay late
- Clients who don't want to pay
- Clients who disappear with a large, unpaid bill
- Finding clients (ideally ones who don't need cajoling to pay on time)
- Self-employment taxes and managing expenses for deductions
- Providing your own health coverage and managing the benefits one would get at a full-time position
- Being your own safety net during periods of no work
- Legal exposure
It also feels irrelevant for me (and most people on HN?) because the sort of work I do (computer programming) tends to be salaried. There are self-employed contractors but I feel like they don’t count as they’re also exempt (I think) and they get to choose their rates. When I saw the title I thought it would be comparing employment to contracting or entrepreneurialism. I feel like the things that will have a big impact for compensation are more long-term, discretionary, or growth related (if you’re going to get an x% pay rise every year then your starting pay makes a big difference to the total over all the years), eg promotions/equity/bonuses/switching employers.
It be really nice to just clock in and clock out. Not care about how much work is remaining, and operate like a barista, I just show up, serve up some lines of code, a few code reviews, hand out a few estimates and suggest a technical approach to business and then on the dot clock out.
If the company feels things aren't going fast enough, they'd need to work harder to not waste my precious clock-in time, keep me busy on the most important things always, or pay me double for extra time.
But instead they started to approach employees with the salaried proposition, and some people said yes. So here we are.
Now it's not that bad, you need to learn to manage your own time, your own work/life balance. It does mean you can decide what hour to show up to work and when to leave (to some extent). It means your launch break can be twice as long if you want it to be sometimes.
It also means that if things aren't going as fast as they need too, it's your responsability to manage your time and commitments better. It's up to you now to make sure you are focused and kept working on the most important thing, that you say no to distractions and make sure the processes favor productivity instead of churn and endless debates. It's up to you to make sure you don't take on work that won't deliver on expectations, and thus up to you to manage those expectations, etc.
But it means sometimes you can take more vacation than you technically have to take as long as your manager and team can work them in, etc.
The biggest downside to me is that it makes the environment more competitive. Basically how much your coworkers will choose to work will set the standards, and it'll be hard for you to do less. If people start responding to emails at night and on weekends, if people make late fridays the norm, or extra Sunday "catch up on todos" a norm, you kind of have too as well now. So when you have a family and outside commitments I think it gets harder to manage, because you can't easily plan around variable hours, you have a more unpredictable schedule, you don't really know if next month will be extra busy and you'll need to push in to the evenings or if it'll be the opposite, etc.
I also meant it as, tech workers could ask to be paid overtime when they negotiate, independently or jointly, there are always such options. I don't personally know if I'd want to be a wage worker over a salaried worker, and I suspect that's true of most, we only know what we know, I can't predict if being on a wage would actually make the job more pleasant or less, so the status quo lives on.
>Not always. It depends on how a company implements it. But often.
I'd really like to see something that backs up this "often" and how many people really work more hours because they're 'expected to' or ... choose to.
I'm reminded of OSHA rules that dictate workplace safety. Sometimes it's argued that they're there to keep employers from creating unsafe conditions, but when you read accident reports you find folks willing to take personal risks to the benefit of no one ... all on their own.
There are employers who will pressure folks, but IMO a lot of folks who misinterpret / don't deal with what they think are pressures to work more ... and folks who just do it on their own...
I think this is all a lot more nuanced and 'often' is presented here without much reason to think that's accurate.
Most people are self-motivated, but they may not be good judges of risk, and a small group of employees go off and do something reckless, get hurt, and now everyone needs to follow safety protocols that reduce risky behavior even if these impose a cost for the 90% that would use common sense and avoid danger.
The counterargument is we know something about human nature, so procedures that are dangerous to reckless people is a problem when you are a large business and a given percent of your workforce is going to be reckless.
It's not a direct connection that salaried must be better pay and benefits, but it is how it works out most of the time.
Also I really question the premise of this article so this 'scam' thing should be taken with a grain of salt, a lot of them.
Other cheaper insurance just covers treatment once you’ve been diagnosed by the NHS.
Private insurance isn’t required by any means, but it generally means skipping waiting lists, which can be long for some things - usually the annoying / potentially painful but ultimately not life-threatening things.
If you have cancer or something like that, generally the NHS is amazing. If you have something less serious it could take them a while to get around to you - and having spent the last year dealing with Covid I would expect that to be exacerbated.
> The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours.
No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. If I ever have to work over time, then I get one hour of PTO for each hour of OT.
I don't know if it's an American thing to assume that all companies must be predatory toward their employees or if it's just the internet populist bubble that favors such content, but neither I nor anyone I know can relate to these kinds of articles.
That’s not salaried exempt. What you’re describing is closer to hourly pay. However, it’s not a perfect fit because hourly pay is 1.5x after 40.
It's worth noting that, if you're in the United States, minimum salary for exemption also varies by state [0]. For example, as of 2021 in California, for many professions it is now 58k USD.
[0] https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/exempt-employees-minimum-sal...
At my company, you absolutely work more and get less if you're salary than hourly. Overtime is both common and expected. Hourly will make more than their managers if a year is busy, by a hefty amount sometimes, but they both will work the same amount of hours.
Particularly in the Netherlands there are collective working agreements (CAO), which have set up arrangements with the employer that do this for certain job levels, but this is not arranged per law (particularly for higher level jobs). See e.g. https://www.juridischloket.nl/werk-en-inkomen/arbeidsvoorwaa...
Similar in the UK, and even more so, the UK did not fully take part of the Working Time Directive when they were back in the EU and allows opt-outs. See e.g. https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours. These opt-outs are often supplied as part of your employment contract. This opt-out has been in all my contracts with my jobs in the UK, although I in practice rarely overworked.
Now it is the case both in NL and UK that for most jobs that are "lower" on the job level, there are overtime rates. But both the UK and NL have expectations that "higher" job levels are expected to come with over time. I have not seen any programming job in the UK that pays my overtime.
Similarly in Switzerland, a family member of mine used to get paid over time (or be able to take it as PTO), but when they got promoted, it stopped.
Just to clarify, this means this is an article about someone making less than $35,568/yr plus overtime that doesn't know how to get an exempt salary that is like 2 - 8 times greater than that?
I don't think this debate really applies to any of the American residents, or anybody working for the American companies on this forum. The inflection points where it makes a difference is so low.
Do hourly employees get any health benefits?
You want the $ figure and job security of the salaried employee, but not the duties. You don't want to be classified like a contract worker, subject to termination at any time, but you want the flexibility to work when and as you please. You want the freedom to not have your hours monitored, your steps and productivity measured, but not the responsibilities that come with such autonomy.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create some parallel lalaland universe where normal constraints no longer worked as they do. While we're at it, I want an airplane that's cheap, fast, doesn't use liquid fuel, and doesn't hurt the environment. I think we can all be billionaires.
Sure, freelancer/consultant is a valid path, but only if you're good at (and enjoy) marketing & sales. Otherwise - you can get lucky to work for a startup that IPOs (or a company whose shares increase dramatically) and end up earning a lot more as salaried.
Despite the horror stories, particular those in the game industry, most are not working 60 hours/week. The most surefire way to make good money and become wealthy is by working at one of the FAANGs and investing. I know the startup founder is romanticized here and in the media, and in the rare cases when it works, it can be great. But, if you look at the risk adjusted value, startups are not very good.
With that said, I prefer small companies/startups because I like the freedom and control that comes along. I know I'm leaving money on the table, but I'm getting things I value over money.
The risk and opportunity cost seem way to high. Then again I don't know how to measure that risk...
No such thing as job security.
If you're good, they won't throw you out even if you're a freelancer. If you're bad they will throw you out even if you're an employee.
I did both and the only difference I saw was the type of work you do. As a freelancer I have less hand-holding than an employee, but also more freedom.
Hiring, getting a headcount was hard. Exactly because employees were harder to let go and a bigger investment. We were 5-6 on our team over 6 years and had 4 contractors on and off on the side during that time. And it was as simple as: sorry guys, we won't need your service for the next 6 months, because this and that. (Our work was always planned ahead for 6 months, decision made 2x a year.)
Let's not pretend that employees woke up one day and decided to be more self-interested. Employers have been working on eroding job security and employee rights for years.
As a salaried worker you are expected to do a job, if that job takes you 20 hours this week and 45 next week that's fine as long as the job is done.
What is currently happening is most of the time people work 50-60 hours and get paid at basically a 40 hour a week version of their job. So they end up giving the company 10-20 hours free (as it's not every now and then but basically every single week).
There are other motivations that can be added, say if you get a percentage of the company then you working 10-20 hours extra is accounted for by some other benefit.
But as it stands (say you work as a manager at random fastfood) there is no benefit to you working 60 hour weeks. You don't get extra money, you don't get benefits (some long time employees may get stock options but most don't). What's excepted of you does not correlate to the amount you are paid (which for random fastfood is usually what an hourly rate at 40 hours a week would be plus a little extra). If you did the same job as hourly (only difference being termination is easier for hourly than salaried) you would get paid more.
It's a perfectly valid question and one most should be asking.
I suspect the problem is with measuring what "job is done" means exactly when it comes to intellectual work in a team, so companies use a simplistic "X hours worked" as a proxy.
The whole article says that this is a fantasy.
Get your job done in 20 hours a week and say I’m out and see what happens at the vast majority of companies.
The employer gets the free extra 5 hours in a 45 hour week but the employee gets judged (at best) for working 20 hours the next week.
But some roles (such as say programming) if you have X tasks a week and you get them all done in half the time and piece out in my mind that should be acceptable.
It shouldn't be acceptable that if you get all your tasks done in half the time they just give you a bunch of other tasks until you work exactly 40 hours. And there are others that take 2x to do all their tasks so you end up getting half of their tasks.
Being good at your job should be rewarded and encouraged and if that means saying "get all these done and if you get them done earlier and just as good you get Friday off" is a perfect motivator.
I think the problem is people grew up expecting to work 40 hours and if you don't work 40 hours you're a slacker. And that can be true, but it can also be completely wrong.
Great! Start a company and make this acceptable. Because the whole point of the article is that in practice this is almost never acceptable in the real world, regardless of what the definition of “exempt” is.
Countries with better rights for employees exist in this universe, on this planet.
You might have more job security in other countries, but your job might be theoretical.
You can't have it all.
> The US has high innovation.
> US employees have poor job security.
> Therefore high innovation must be caused by poor job security.
There are many historic and contemporary causes for the US's economic success. Arguably, the US was even more innovative in the 50s and 60s when job security was much better and unions were more powerful.
Europe has far less unemployment than the US.
Please stop.
> You want the $ figure and job security of the salaried employee Yes. I don't see why I should have to live without job security because I am paid hourly.
> but not the duties. Nope. I want a healthy work-life balance and I don't think that has to mean not meating my duties.
> You don't want to be classified like a contract worker, subject to termination at any time Again, yes. I want to be respected and live without the looming terror of joblessness.
> you want the flexibility to work when and as you please. You want the freedom to not have your hours monitored, your steps and productivity measured Yes. I think I aught to be respected enough to not need micro-managing at every turn.
> but not the responsibilities that come with such autonomy. Again, nope.
> Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create some parallel lalaland universe... It's not so far fetched. There are plenty of places the world over that already treat their employees like valuable, respected, worthy people.
You really shouldn't assume that your story is the norm.
If you have a business idea, one of the best books I've read is The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia. Making stuff is a lot easier than learning whether or not you're on the right track without spending everything you have.
The last thing I'd suggest is to be concerned with history and America's oncoming fascist trainwreck. Peikoff wrote The Ominous Parallels forty years ago, and his words are every bit as chilling as they are prescient.
I am pretty sure I’ll still be rich, and you'll come up with more evasions to explain why you aren't.
Oh yeah, buying into a cult whose entire appeal is convincing selfish people they can stop feeling bad about it, you're very very developed.
Also hysterical that this nose-to-the-grindstone approach is what you're advocating when you retired over a one time return from a super volatile stock.
I'm maxharris9 on Twitter
Nothing wrong with it but individuals shouldn’t assume that the only way to succeed is by gambling.
If you want to do something with your $100K, use it as a house down-payment or consider mutual funds. Or just yeet it into GME, I'm not a financial advisor.
11.14% Bitcoin, 87.96% TSLA, 0.90% ARKG.
NB: this is not investment advice. What worked for me in the past may not work for you now. Do your own research.
Socrates said that he's better off because he knows nothing and knows he knows nothing, whereas others know nothing but think they know something. Paraphrasing, but this seems applicable to your situation.