I wonder what (if there is one) the logical reason behind this exemption is.
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.