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Comment by cgrealy | Hacker News Reader

Don’t work overtime for free. It’s that simple.

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.

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You're assuming your line manager has the power and/or budget to hire more staff. This is likely not the case for the vast majority of salaried employees.

That’s not my problem? I’m not going to give away my valuable time for free because other people cannot run a company.

Then it’s the managers job to manage expectations in terms of what her team can produce. The occasional push should be acceptable, but sustained expectation of unrewarded overtime with implications for burnout shouldn’t be acceptable.

Another point, we all get things are limited, but when the hierarchy/management simply orders shit to be done from afar, without respect, understanding, proper knowledge about the situation, suddenly everybody is underperforming. Take the same group with a good leader then they will do twice more twice fast twice happy.

What?! Of course nobody thinks that, but they have the power to influence the people that do have the power to get more budget, that is part or their job!

> You're assuming your line manager has the power and/or budget to hire more staff

Welll, they did say:

> If nothing is done, leave.

>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.

Right...I've been in a salaried position at various jobs for 15+ years and have never once worked more than 45 hours/week or so. Meanwhile coworkers who are getting paid exactly the same as me work 60+ hours/week for some reason. I have to assume anyone working 60+ hours a week either is avoiding their home life(or inner life), or is so unsure about their position in the company that they think they need to work 1.5x just to not get fired.

I refused to work free overtime for a shitty quality control job and they fired me.

Best thing they could’ve done, now I have a great job with no expectation of overtime! I do much more effective work too.

There should be a couple of classes about that in HS. Just 4 classes over a month to discuss and enact situations before you go into the real world.

There are so many things that we should be teaching kids about how to live in the real world.

- how to apply for a job (write a good cv/resume and cover letter)

- how to deal with finance

- basic cyber security

- critical thinking

That's just fine for (software) engineers, but I can't imagine this going well for an employee in a employer's market.

It depends on where you work. In most of europe, overtime is paid more than normal salary, even 1.5x. If your employer is forcing you to have unpayed overtime, he will have big problems.

Right. It's the same in the US, but if you make over $35,568 your position can be exempt from this. OP is asking if being exempt is a scam.

If you read the article it talks about exempt vs non-exempt and how salaried workers that make over $35,568 and do "higher-level work" are exempt from overtime. Those that are not exempt get 1.5x pay for overtime and 2x for double overtime (e.g. overtime on holiday). So in the US overtime is always 1.5x but many salaried workers simply don't get overtime.

That's some XIX-century level exploitation right there... As if the workers rights movements never happened in the US (or they did, but for some reason only for manual workers and not white collar).

It’s exactly the same in France with the « cadre » status.

In Poland we have an exception as well, but it's for C-level managers only. How does it work France?

Well the cadre status is is the same way as the exempt. It’s easy to reach the point where you can ‘qualify’ for it, unfortunately.

If I get called at a weekend for say an hour or so, I get a choice - either 6 hours salary or a day off in lieu.

If it's a 5 minute call I don't bother with anything official, just have a couple of hours off during the week.

> If you are regularly working 45+ hours a week, your position is under-resourced for what is expected.

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.

Maybe you don't work fast or good enough, but the solution to that is not "work more".

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.

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