I get that my work after hours is essentially "free" labor. But I wasn't aware that there are actually laws that say salaried employees are entitled to more compensation when working after hours.
The FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt employees be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for all hours worked, plus time and one-half their regular hourly rates for hours worked beyond 40 per week.
With few exceptions, to be exempt an employee must (a) be paid at least $23,600 per year ($455 per week), and (b) be paid on a salary basis, and also (c) perform exempt job duties. These requirements are outlined in the FLSA Regulations (promulgated by the U.S. Department of Labor). Most employees must meet all three "tests" to be exempt.
An employee who meets the salary level tests and also the salary basis tests is exempt only if s/he also performs exempt job duties. These FLSA exemptions are limited to employees who perform relatively high-level work. Whether the duties of a particular job qualify as exempt depends on what they are. Job titles or position descriptions are of limited usefulness in this determination. (A secretary is still a secretary even if s/he is called an "administrative assistant," and the chief executive officer is still the CEO even if s/he is called a janitor.) It is the actual job tasks that must be evaluated, along with how the particular job tasks "fit" into the employer's overall operations.
http://www.flsa.com/coverage.html
Generally managers, engineers, and most salaried office jobs are "exempt". Lately more focus has gone towards defining who exactly is an exempt vs non-exempt salaried employee in white collar office jobs.
> Computer Employees: Those who work in computer-related occupations, for example computer systems analysts, computer programmers and computer software engineers, are exempt as long as their work involves a combination of primary duties that include applying systems analysis techniques and procedures, consulting with users to determine specifications, and designing, developing, analyzing, creating, testing and modifying computer systems and programs.
Edit: State laws sometimes offer more protection, e.g. California, for non-high salary professionals.
It is surprisingly hard to find explanations for this - the web is choked with articles explaining who's exempt and who's not, but not so many with justifications or reasoning or historical context.
Another round of policy discussion is underway: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/us/politics/obama-will-see...
A third reason might be the argument from market power stemming from the fact that if you can personally create $10 million of cold hard cash value using nothing but a bit of time in front of a computer, and with no long-term detrimental effects on you of any kind, then the fact that you are minting money creates a seller's market (just as there will always be a seller's market for legal currency), and it [might be an argument for] allowing you to work whatever hours you wanted - or sleep in the office, be offered legal drugs, whatever. if you didn't like it you could go somewhere else.
it's very different if you were cleaning staff at any of the same companies. they "need" more protection than you do!
Edit: from your responses it is clear that many people it applies to should also be owed overtime. I was just throwing out one "logical reason".
In addition I've thought of the crazy hours residents and doctors put in - so that high earnings / value add might not guarantee that much market power, if the conditions are the same at all hospitals.
on the other hand much of computer labor is absolutely in a seller's market (from the point of view of the employee) and clearly does not need the same level of protection. there is a lot in many workplaces that a "computer professional" wouldn't put up with for a second.
It's not like being exempt means an employer is not allowed to offer you overtime pay. They can still do it. You can still demand it.
Cleaning staff are (overwhelmingly) entitled to overtime pay, by law.
Tech workers are more-well-paid than the cleaning staff and generally better situated to negotiate for any given job. But I don't see how that necessarily carries over to increased success in negotiating payment schemes that differ from the legal and industry standard for the position.
"...Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.
White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.
“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt"
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/11/17/maxx-assistan...
If you happen to be a tech writer, you are not exempt from overtime pay in California. Why is that, you ask? Are tech writers not minting money using a bit of time in front of a computer? Is there not a sellers market for tech writers?
But of course these are all the wrong questions to ask. It is because tech writers thought they deserved overtime pay, lobbied for it, and were granted their wishes. Scroll down for how that happened.
Scroll a bit further and you might realize that the original exemption was put in place by a long dead Republican senator from Idaho in 1990. I'm not convinced he had those deep insights into the market of computer professionals.
For example if you are working a support job that regularly requires you to work 50+ hour weeks you should probably be getting overtime pay.
Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The statute of limitations is 4 years I think, so there's a lot of back-pay that can accumulate in this sort of situation. Keep in mind that in CA overtime is defined as 1.5x for hours that exceed 40 in a week or 8 in a day, and 2x for hours that exceed 12 in day. Even if you only work 40 hours a week if you occasionally pull a long day or all-nighter you are supposed to be receiving overtime.
2. Go out and enjoy life
3. Commit something at 7 PM
4. Profit!
I'm in.
I wished that for specific topics such as this one where the geographical location of a poster is highly relevant we would post our locations or have a switch in our profile to get a better outlook of where people are coming from.
And penalties for requiring employees to work over that, apply only when this is exceeded when it's averaged over a 17 week period.
But you're right, many fields pretty much bring up the 48-hour overtime exemption contract to you on day 1, many temp jobs, or things like catering/bar-work require you to sign one of these.
On my first day of work, I received a document containing company rules and guidelines. Overtime is never paid and it is considered "an engineer's pride" to fix any bugs in his own time. Of course this overtime isn't limited to bugfixing, and when there's a deadline coming up (there's always a deadline coming up) or when someting just isn't working you are expected to do whatever it takes to get things working.
One of my colleagues received comments on a recent evaluation after he refused to come in on a Saturday because there was a problem with a display driver on a project he hadn't worked on for weeks.
The 38 hours we work each week is more of a guideline than a rule really. Unless of course you want to work less, in which case that would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
You could even try proving you worked too many hours, but that's quite hard to do (a list of start and end times would surely not suffice).
Edit: Also, they will surely claim that they did not tell you to perform that overtime, and that in fact you did so without them knowing.
Basically for me is very hard to understand why I should work for free ( I could want to work overtime for free, but if I am imposed to work overtime I must be paid)
If you are in software engineering, the answer is that the US pays the best salaries in the world. You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.
No, a few small regions in the US pays amongst the best salaries in the world. Most of the US have software engineering salaries that are nothing special. And lots of places in Europe have plenty of jobs at similar salary levels to e.g. Silicon Valley.
> You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.
... and most of the developed world have seen through this bullshit. In the EU, for example, the Working Time Directive sets limits, and if the company assigns duties that are impossible to carry out within those limits, then that is the company's problem. For a reason: A lot of companies tried (and try) to abuse the notion of a salaried employee to pile on duties far in excess of what can reasonably be carried out within the expected contract period.
(looking to exempted groups in the UK: my ex was until recently a lawyer for one of the largest lawfirms in the world, based out of London; while on paper her contracted hours are about 40 and her salary on that basis seemed amazing, her actual hours based on assigned duties that would never be possible to fit into 40 hours per week brought her actual hourly rate below that of he secretary)
Honest question: where? Switzerland? And how much are we talking? A fresh 22-year-old graduate can easily make $110k + stock his first year out of school in SV.
Comes out to around $22/hr base rate.
You start doing that around $50k and you are around the same pay rate as an overnight stocker at a grocery with couple years on the job.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/night-stocker-salary-SRCH_...
I would assume it depends on the part of the country you are in as well.
In any case, I don't believe that these companies will give overtime. In fact, your glassdoor link doesn't show any company paying over $30,000/year to their night workers, with the average being around $25,000.
Assuming the position required 60 hour work weeks(as a non trivial amount of developer positions do) this is what the two would look like for exactly the same final pay.
With salary one can say: $50,000/year
With hourly one would say: $13/hr + overtime
While being the exact same pay, it looks quite a bit different. No?
My mom is a soon-to-retire nurse and she was a salaried employee who, if she worked overtime, made either time-and-a-half (1.5x) or double-time (2x) pay depending upon the situation.
But software developers, for all of the talk of ninjas and rockstars and whatnot, are a socially low and easily exploited class that make decisions against our own interests (laughing off the idea of unions, etc); so we often work up to 1.5 to 2 times (60-80 hours is very common) over our official salaried hours for free.
I'm just older now (41 this year) and while I still work as a software developer and have avoided the management route (since I still love coding), I've become somewhat jaded on the business end of things.
Don't get me wrong, I think in certain situations (eg. developer is a founder or has meaningful preferential equity in a company) that working very long hours toward a goal without directly being paid for those hours is perfectly acceptable; but I cringe when I think of how many hours of sleep I missed in my younger days for a pat on the back or token meaningless non-monetary perks when I was a common-stock-holding pleb being constantly diluted out of equity in even the moderately successful companies.
But I _do_ agree that, compared to many other professions prestiges is low. I also agree that it's time for unions, although simply owing the company collectively may work better. More importantly, people should not allow themselves to be exploited and realise that doing so is just as bad for them as for their fellow developers.
I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US it is kind of a complex situation where we are externally not regarded as socially lower (from the outside it is all very glamorous and we are all Silicon Valley millionaires) and we do make decent baseline wages (though outside of a few companies like Google there tends to be a glass ceiling on our earnings unless we become something other than software developers, eg become tech managers) and (rather importantly right now) we do have a very high level of employability relative to many other professional fields.
But all that aside, we are still often exploited as a resource (IMO) by the "ruling class" of business people/MBA types/investors/etc in ways they would not allow themselves to be exploited.
That will definitely not help bring prestige to the field. Professions that require unions are seen as being so easy to enter that they need to form unions to avoid the effects of the free market.
I'd also trade in a lot of prestige for the guarantee of employers not having overtime as a free resource that employees are expected to give with a smile.
But I agree on the prestige thing, I'm a non-union web developer and I don't feel much prestige in my position.
Software is in high demand but still a middle class job (similar to nursing). It's very mentally demanding. The physical demand is different as it's a problem of not being active enough to be healthy. Not to mention that in software you are likely spending a significant time working outside of normal working hours if it's for your company or just to increase your skills/learn something new. How else are you supposed to have the required a super awesome github profile to show when you go for an interview?
Take this with a grain of salt, it really depends on where you live. I live in the Ohio area and of everyone I went to college with and everyone I have ever worked with I have never met someone that has worked more than 45 hours a week.
That said, most people try to average out to around 40 hours, because they usually agree to five 8 hour days.
Previously I had to work over 50-60 hours regularly without over time pay. That probably goes against what is expected of an "exempt" employee and I probably should have been compensated. I left that position for obvious reasons.
Generally in the US if you are paid a guaranteed yearly salary, meaning not paid hourly, you do not get overtime pay. One exception I've experience is in retail. For example the manager of our deli department would get paid 1/2 time (not time + 1/2) for overtime.
If that's the case, then Silicon Valley doesn't deserve to exist.
The only people for whom it's reasonable to expect unpaid overtime are genuine founders with real control over the company and their place in it, and who will get real rewards if it succeeds,
You work so many unpaid overtime hours that your actual hourly wage isn't THAT high anymore.
Maybe you do. Except on projects with direct benefit to your career, it's a waste of time and you'd be better off to stop. You don't get more respect by being a chump. You just get loaded with more grunt work.
You want your bosses to think you have leadership potential, not that you're a hard worker who can be used as a garbage disposal for stuff no one else wants to do, or who will accept abuse downwind of others' mistakes (understaffing, bad planning, etc.)
especially if you also take only 10 vacation days into account
Don't work for shitty companies. Three weeks is the absolute minimum.
Granted I am not afraid to get fired so there is no fear involved. However I never got fired in my life.
Should that not happen, I will assume the firm doesn't care if I move on after 2-3 years for opportunities with better compensation.
It is what it is. I'm married and have financial obligations. That said, who's to say I don't moonlight and make extra cash that way? ;-)