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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

It depends on your job and other factors, but sometimes the answer is, sadly, yes.

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.

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Sounds bitter. Software developers are certainly not regarded as socially lower than a nurse, quite the opposite (at least in Europe).

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.

Not really bitter, just somewhat jaded.

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.

>I also agree that it's time for unions

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.

Doctors and lawyers regulate who can enter their field. Doctors even control how many students med schools can accept each year. They seem to still be 'prestigious' professions. They were just smart enough to avoid the word 'union', since it's been tarnished by 50 years of political attacks.

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.

Just because a group of people got together to agree on something work-related doesn't necessarily make them like a union.

But I agree on the prestige thing, I'm a non-union web developer and I don't feel much prestige in my position.

Healthcare is a high demand field, especially nursing. They seem to be able to negotiate shorter work weeks like working 3 10 hour days and being paid for 40 hours, etc. It's somewhat physically and mentally demanding.

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?

In CA you have to make 84k a year for the computer professional overtime exemption. If you are making under that you are still getting overtime pay. There are many jobs that do not meet the requirements to be exempt also.

>so we often work up to 1.5 to 2 times (60-80 hours is very common) over our official salaried hours for free.

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.

You certainly don't seem to think very highly of software developers.

For whatever it is worth, I am a software developer and I'm as guilty as any of working 80 hour weeks, especially in the first 10 years of my career.

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.

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