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So if you perform badly, you get paid less? Or if you perform exemplarily do you get paid more? How much do you get paid for each unit of output? Can you measure it so it's always the same, for every person, at any time?

If not, you're selling your time - not your output.

This is just… false? Yes, if they cared/could, they would lower the salary of underperformers. The definition of a salary is that you’re paid to fulfill a role, not to work specific hours. That’s why hourly is called hourly.

Either I’m taking crazy pills or this is a silly debate :)

Obviously I'm not privy to your contract of employment, but so far in over 20 years in the market, all of mine established work hours.

If I worked less than that, I'd get paid less.

Some contracts had provisions for overtime, in which case I could be paid more for more hours of work.

That's selling my time. I'd still get paid the same for the same number of hours, regardless of my output.

With good or great output, there was a small chance I'd get a promotion, or a pay rise in the next round of performance reviews (which in my experience are nothing of the sort). With bad output, there was a small chance I'd get fired. In either case, my pay was never tied to my output. I'd still get paid for the hours I worked, regardless of how well I performed.

> you’re paid to fulfill a role

See above. You're usually getting paid to fulfill a role for a certain amount of time. If "number of hours you've fulfilled your role" is how you measure your output, then I 100% agree this is a silly debate.

That is not what I consider output though. A factory is paid per output. If they produce 100 cars, they get paid 100 * price of 1 car. If they produce 90 cars, they get paid 10% less, and so on.

Thanks for the polite reply :) I am very confident I am right about this very pedantic point, though obviously it matters little in the end for many roles, as you’ve noted.

For example, this is a good link: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/salary-vs-ho...

Your job may require you work 40h, but that’s more of a employment requirement, such as “you’re a boat captain and need to be on the bridge for X hours in normal workdays, but get paid a monthly salary regardless.” That doesn’t mean you’re paid for your time any more than a dress code clause means you’re being paid for your fashion :)

But again all moot in our industry in most cases! Really gets important in cases such as fast food, where they’ll promote people to salaried “manager” positions paying $40K/y that have no set working hours, but their responsibilities require them to work well over 40h/week

EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!

> EDIT: perhaps a clearer example: if you had to crunch and work 50h this week, and couldn’t take 10h off next week, would you require extra pay for that? If no, you’re salaried!

That's what a salaried position seems to mean in the US from what I can gather. Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view, so maybe your definition is relevant.

I don't think that's a universal definition of salary, though. I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it's in the books.

That's still different from an hourly wage where the pay is calculated directly per hour and varies with the exact number of hours worked and recorded.

The pay also doesn't directly vary based on actual useful output. Whether I work one day's worth of hours effectively or half as effectively doesn't affect how much I'm paid. So, I'm really directly selling my time, not my output. (The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached.)

That, to me, seems to be approximately what some of the other comments in this thread mean when they're saying you're selling your time, not your output. Whether they're talking about the US or not.

Of course if you have a set amount of real output you're expected to produce within a day or a week and it's entirely your problem if you don't manage to produce that in a set number of hours, you're in some sense paid for your output. Your quantifiable useful output probably doesn't directly map to bucks paid, though; most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.

I assume that even in the US, you'd still be expected to be present for a set number of hours even if you managed to produce the expected output in less. In that sense you'd also be selling your time, not output.

So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality.

    I don't think that's a universal definition of salary, though. I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week. If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point. Maybe next week, maybe next month, but it's in the books.

Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this. This would make you a non-exempt worker in the US and in many other similar jurisdictions, meaning that you're being paid hourly instead of salaried. Most companies with similar policies instead have the following language:

    Comp time is granted to exempt positions. There is no legal requirement or obligation of [Company Name] to grant comp time to exempt employees. A supervisor may choose to grant comp time to exempt employees who are required to work in excess of 40 hours per week for special projects or during weekends or any normally scheduled time off.

Note "special projects" and "may choose to". The company is offering this as a benefit, not a requirement of the contract

> This would make you a non-exempt worker in the US and in many other similar jurisdictions, meaning that you're being paid hourly instead of salaried.

Yes, in the US. I questioned whether that's a universal definition.

I'm not being paid hourly. I get paid the same monthly salary regardless of how many working days or hours exactly there happen to be in a particular month. A February that happens to have the fewest possible work days pays the same as a 31-day month that happens to have the highest possible number of working days.

The number of hours per working day is set in the contract, but it's flextime so I might work one hour less than that one day and one hour more on another. Paid overtime is also a thing, but either way, I'm entitled to compensation in either form if I work more than X hours a day.

"Salaried position" may have a specific meaning in the US but that doesn't mean that's exactly what salary universally means. I think that particular phrase is just language specific to the US and some other similar jurisdictions.

"Hourly" and "no compensation for overtime" aren't the only two logical possibilities.

And either way, since real output from most knowledge work isn't directly quantifiable anyway, I'd say people are at least to an extent paid for their time rather than directly for their output. That was the original claim, and I think whoever pointed that out was right about it being part of the problem.

> Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.

Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

> > Please cite the language in your employment contract that entitles you to this.

> Please consider the possibility that I'm not in the US. You're just going to have to take my word for it.

I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything! I am honestly curious about how different labor laws exist around the world. But I don't think this distinction is rare. Germany, for example, has one of the most regulated and regarded-as-worker-friendly payroll systems in the world. But even Germany still makes a distinction between the fixed pay scale and außer tarif employees, which almost universally has an expectation of vertrauensarbeitszeit ("trust-based working hours" i.e. non-hourly work)

I would be surprised if there is a modern country that does not make this distinction between hourly and non-hourly pay in some way.

It's a bit complicated since most of the terms are not directly written in my employment contract.

The overall framework concerning working time comes from labour law. That would include the maximum of regular working hours per day (8 hours max per day or 40 per week in the legislation, can be less by contract or agreement). The law also includes provisions for flexible working time which allows the actual daily working time to vary the way I described, i.e. +n hours here and -n hours there, instead of being a constant X hours a day. Flextime arrangements are the norm in white collar work.

Overtime (exceeding regular hours without being compensated with reduced hours at another time) is also possible but must be explicitly agreed upon and paid for. That requirement also comes from the legislation.

Some of the details concerning overtime compensation and the implementation of flextime arrangement come from a collective labour agreement. The collective agreement does not and cannot supersede legislation but it can specify some of the details that the law leaves open.

My employment contract specifies the (regular) number of hours per day and defers to the collective agreement for most other details such as the specifics of flextime.

There is a distinction between hourly and monthly pay, as in my example about the varying number of working days per month; hourly would mean that I'm literally paid X euros per hour multiplied by Y recorded hours of working time. My contract is still essentially time-based, so it may be more on the "hourly" side of the divide the way you see it, but it's considered a salary, not an hourly wage. I'm still effectively selling my time.

Some roles are indeed exempt from legislation that concerns working time. That would include e.g. independent leadership roles, so if you're a director of an organization or a branch, the legislation does not apply. Your working hours aren't limited and you're not legally entitled to compensation for exceeding any specific number of hours. Other exemptions made on the legislation level include e.g. teachers, researchers, clergy, and some public sector and government roles. Some of those may still have regulations set in a collective labour agreement specific to the sector, but practically, if you're e.g. a professor, you probably end up working more than 40 hours a week and the concepts of comp time or paid overtime don't exist.

The exemptions do not include e.g. most engineers or most other white-collar work. Some people in those roles do end up doing unpaid and unaccounted for overtime in practice but that's despite the regulation, not in accordance with it.

IANAL and I don't really have the time to verify which parts of the rules exactly come from legislation and which ones come from a collective agreement, but that's the overall picture. It's been the same way in every white collar job I've had outside of the academia.

This is in Finland.

> I want to be clear—this wasn't intended to be a gotcha or anything!

Ok, sorry. I read it as more of insistence or questioning than curiosity.

> Perhaps a lot of this entire conversation is had from more or less of an American point of view

I'm beginning to wonder the same. I don't really understand the "job market" in the US or the regulations around it. Every time I hear or read something about it I get even more confused.

> I get paid the same sum every month, and I have a fixed number of hours I'm expected to fill per week.

That's the kind of employment contract I'm familiar with.

> If I work ten hours more than that one week, that counts as +10 hours in the records, and that allows me to do 10 hours less at some point.

That's one possibility. To take time in lieu. Another is to be paid overtime. They're both different ways of dealing with the same situation.

> The amount of useful output may of course make bosses more or less happy and deadlines reached or not reached

Precisely the point I made prior as well. We seem to have a similar understanding of this.

> most knowledge workers probably don't even have such an easily quantifiable unit of actual output that you could do that.

Indeed. That's the point I raised in my first comment on this thread.

> So maybe it's a bit of a mix of both in reality.

There's always an expectancy of output in any work relation. That said, if your pay is more tied to "doing work" for a certain amount of time, you're getting paid for that. Normally your output or some approximation of it will be used to determine better pay, or even whether you get to keep the job. Even if you get fired though, you're normally still given a notice period - and get paid for showing up during that.

That's still selling your time, with an expectation of output.

It sort of makes sense that working life discussions here tend to have a US-centric bias, considering the connections to SV. But it does seem to lead to kind of narrow assumptions sometimes.

So, you work hourly?

I get paid for 40 hours of my time per week, on average. So I am being paid for my time. Every extra hour I work in one week, I have to compensate in another. And vice versa.

Not the law, just your preference. Lots and lots of salaried employees work more or less than 40h/week, every week. Almost always the former ofc lol

Is that why its measured and paid in time-based increments while output is only measured in arbitrary ways and at fuzzy granularity?

“I am paid every two weeks” != “I am paid for my time”. Social security also pays out biweekly, and it has nothing to do with time

Both salary and hourly roles ultimately have expectations around both time spent and work contributed. On average, in both cases, the time spent portion is tracked more closely while the worked performed portion is functionally given more leeway.

That’s why the original comment nails it in the first two paragraphs. It may not be intended this way, but effectively people are paid for their time much moreso than their output.

Maybe it would be more clear if you specified salary is in exchange for a certain minimum amount of output, then I would kinda agree. But then you also are expected be at work for the remainder of your contractual work hours. So it’s not as easy as saying one or the other is completely true, it’s a mixture of both time and output

I haven’t been at any salaried position:

My contract explicitly states that any week in which I perform any work, I’m to be paid a prorated weekly amount.

Managers do not care what hours I put in if my tickets + other duties are performed — and typically, I managed to get away with 35-37 hours. Some weeks were more like 50. Again, the role was duty based, not hourly.

Every salaried job I’ve had has been output, not time.