Hacker News Reader

Comment by hw-guy | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm missing something, this would have no impact on engineers and other professional employees who are "exempt" from overtime. My nominal 40-hour work week meant nothing if there was a crisis or schedule slip that required putting in many extra hours. The claim that this law would force companies to be more efficient by having fewer meetings assumes management are rational. Also, it's weird that it only applied to companies with >=500 employees; wouldn't this be a strong incentive for smaller companies to resist hiring the 500th employee?

View on HN

Many years ago. Knew a tech worker that had worked years of unpaid overtime for IBM.

She said it was fine, because she was exempt. So I looked up the definition of exempt. She didn't meet the legal definition. Argued with her for hours over it. She refused to believe that she was being taken advantage of. In her mind all a company had to do was say you were exempt, and that was enough. Eventually I gave up.

Following year, IBM lost a big lawsuit. She got a very big check.

https://redmondmag.com/articles/2006/11/26/ibm-pays-tech-wor...

So what is the definition of an exempt worker? How do I know if I am not exempt and being used.

Edit: the downvotes would seem to mean my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer, of course!

A good indicator is "do you have to fill out a timesheet". If you do, that means you're probably paid an hourly wage, and you should be paid overtime; if you don't, you're probably salaried and overtime-exempt. As usual, it's more complicated than that if you get into the weeds (e.g. in the news article linked in the comment you're replying to), and having a lawyer interpret your employment contract is probably the most authoritative way to figure that out if you feel your situation is unusual.

Exempt and non-exempt are orthogonal to salaried an hourly.

---

Overtime for an hourly exempt worker is 1.0x.

Overtime for a salary exempt worker is not defined.

Overtime for an hourly non-exempt worker is 1.5x.

Overtime for a salary non-exempt worker is poorly defined.

---

An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt. One working under that amount is non-exempt.

The specifics of how the FLSA applies to computer professionals is described in https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...

Yes, that is one of the complications, some roles are "salaried nonexempt". :)

For computer professionals, that has a very low threshold of $684 (you have to make less than that per week) to be non-exempt.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17g-overtime-sa...

> Exempt computer employees may be paid at least $684 on a salary basis or on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.

> Overtime for a salary non-exempt worker is poorly defined.

No it's 1.5x (minimum), just like hourly.

To find the hourly wage that the 1.5x applies to, you divide their salary for the pay period by the number of non-overtime paid hours in the pay period.

> An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt.

Under federal law, but maybe not under state law (CA, for instance, has a much higher threshold for computer software workers.)

You can be hourly and exempt. You can be paid a fixed salary and be non-exempt. There are also many salaried people who fill out timecards.

Edit to your edit:

> my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer

Your generalization is frequently incorrect, because billing by the hour is extremely common. The DOL has a very readable website that explains exemptions. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime

I've been salaried and gotten paid overtime.

Just to be clear -- frequently incorrect even among HN readers? I would think one or more of these exemptions apply to just about everyone likely to read these comments who has a job, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.

Ah, I think I get what you were saying, company A is billing company B hourly so employee of company A needs to track their time even if overtime-exempt. Yeah, not necessarily "rare" in tech, mea culpa.

> There are also many salaried people who fill out timecards.

Some of them do so for accounting reasons. Not because it determines their pay.

That is what I am suggesting. Filling out a timecard has nothing to do with whether you are FLSA exempt or not.

If you are a computer professional, it is described in https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...

This is the most common exemption: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime

Employee misclassification is very common, even and especially with higher-paid salaried positions. Whether you are exempt depends on the actual work you do in the day, and in what proportions. It does not depend on your job title, official job description, salary/hourly status, or pay level.

Example: You work 60 hours a week for BigCo. You have a fancy Director of BlahBlah title. You receive a salary of $500k. You spend 49 percent of your time performing truly managerial tasks. The other 51 percent of your time, you’re pitching in to help with your subordinates’ production-level work. Guess what? You’re non-exempt 100% of the time, and your employer owes you 20 hours of overtime each week, at an approximate rate of $240 per hour. This isn’t a kooky law school hypothetical, by the way: actual employees have sued and won on similar facts.

Exempt (and non-exempt) are orthogonal to salaried vs hourly.

An exempt hourly worker still gets paid for over time, just at 1.0x rather than the mandated 1.5x.

---

The "improve productivity through fewer meetings" assumes that the loss in productivity is through meetings. Things like tech support, facilities, and office administrative work generally don't encounter wasteful meetings to the degree that the professional staff does.

> The claim that this law would force companies to be more efficient by having fewer meetings assumes management are rational.

It also assumes that non-exempt employees are spending 8 hours a week in unnecessary meetings. Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?

> Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...

> However, Section 13(a)(1) and Section 13(a)(17) of the FLSA provide an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.

If you're a computer programmer making less than $27.63/hour (and I have been that situation living in low cost of living area), you are a non-exempt professional worker. I got 1.5x overtime, and since the company had it as policy, working evenings or weekends got a shift differential too.

> an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.

NB: California has a much higher exemption threshold for the industry: $47.48/hour or $8,242.32/mo on a salary basis.

Had a few jobs that were mostly just meetings. Mostly because there was so much red tape, that no real work could actually get done. Think, 200 hours of various employees time to approve a 5 hour project.

Researcher/Engineer in government here. The project I've been on for the last year has me averaging over a full day a week in meetings.

The PM (who has been in charge of the project for five years now and at the research center 25+) is "non technical", so she likes to have multiple tech roles in each meeting for "backup".

It's exactly the hell you'd expect.

On the plus side (/s), when COVID forced us telework, they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did, so I have documented exactly why everything is behind.

Unfortunately this law won't apply to us though.

> they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did

Every day? Every week? You left out a word.

Every day would be awful. Every week isn't bad. At my work, we recently implemented a Slack bot that would ask you on Friday what you got done, what you wanted to get done but didn't, if you have any blockers, and what you hope to accomplish next week. Honestly, when it was first deployed, I hated the idea of it, but after a couple weeks, I had noticed that there were times when Friday came and I was thinking "I got fucking nothing done this week", but being prompted by the bot to answer the weekly questions made me stop and think harder on it, then I realized I actually was pretty productive.

Whoops. Every day. Goes to the PM and section boss. The latter doesn't look at it. My former PM also didn't look at it. Just a CYA type thing I guess.

Passing blockers and the like the way you do it seems decent.

Every day?

That's just bonkers.

I had a guy in a previous position that had a manager that started asking for those kinds of updated every Mon/Wed/Fri. After it became clear that he wasn't even reading the messages (The manager would ask about things he had just included in his report an hour prior), he started including gibberish in them.

It was a month before the gibberish was noticed. The boss was noticeably upset when he discovered the last month had been gibberish, but conceded that obviously the reports are a waste of time and stopped asking for them.

Yup.

This bill seems perfectly tailored to really screw medium businesses that aren't big enough to treat everyone like interchangeable cogs and are in blue collar industries where most employees are hourly.

Companies hiring low cost labor already play stupid games to keep people well under 40hr because benefits. They'll just plug a different number into their excel formula and send everyone their new schedules.

Salaried professionals are the ones who's time gets wasted in meetings (because there is no obvious marginal cost to doing so) but they're mostly exempt.

> Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?

No.

Very many do not meet the salary threshold to be exempt, and others don't meet the detailed nature-of-the-job requirements (though, as with contractor status, there is a fair amount of miscategorization on the latter point that employers get away with unless it is challenged.)

That really depends on the industry and company, if you work for facebook,amazon for example, the hours mean nothing but meanwhile, those who work in these companies usually got 3x, 4x pay over the similar positions in other companies.

So it's really the hour rate that matters at the end of day. If you can pull a million a year guess you would be too much adamant about hours. The question is what your objective is, money, or freetime, or whatever your priority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com