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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I was hired onto my first real coding job hourly at first. I asked to go "full time", and was hired "full time". Not long after that I asked my boss to authorize my working more than forty hours. It was only then that he pointed out that because I was "salaried", I was not paid any overtime, actually he could demand I work as many hours as he pleased.

What actually happened was that I studied like a demon until I qualified to work as a contract programmer - where I was paid hourly, and was never particularly expected to work excessively.

Given the pay that coders typically make I don't think it's unreasonable that we are exempt from overtime pay however that should not be regarded as carte blanche to demand we work as many hours as the management asks us to.

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>Given the pay that coders typically make I don't think it's unreasonable that we are exempt from overtime pay

This is a very dangerous argument to make. It's the same sort of argument that makes people turn a blind eye to the wage-collusion class action. Just because we're slightly better paid than average doesn't mean labor protections don't apply to us.

It depends I know people would would be highly insulted if you called them hourly paid.

Having "no fixed hours of work" is a social class signifier in many cultures.

But you are right some one getting paid 250k is still a worker and does have "labor" issues just as some one on 25k does.

Obviously issues may present in different ways for high and low paid workers

"I know people would would be highly insulted if you called them hourly paid."

On the other hand, there are also high-status professionals, like lawyers, who bill by the hour.

I think one advantage of being paid for every hour of work you do is that whoever is paying you is going to be less likely to burn overtime hours on meaningless things. For example, that arbitrary end-of-month deadline you're working on doesn't look nearly as urgent to the business if they need to pay for the night and weekend hours required to meet it. If the company knows that each of your hours is valuable, they might even treat you with more respect.

Well not sure that self employed lawyers are germane to the discussion.

There is also a LOT of sharp practice in legal billing

It gets more complicated when you ask the question "How much money is the software engineer making for the company vs. what the company pays them?"

For argument's sake, let's say you're paid $80K per year. On the one hand, you may think that is high (it always depends what your frame of reference is). If the code you produce directly makes the company millions of dollars though, does that change your assessment of the 'reasonableness' of that salary?

This is the argument I've heard as to why sports stars get paid so much (because you have to look at what they get paid vs the amount of money they're making for the comapnies paying them).

It's a real can of worms.

I see the value in your point, and I generally agree with it. However, in this hypothetical situation, I think you'd largely be ignoring the hypothetical product manager, any marketing involve, servers involved, code written before the software engineer that payed enough for the development (R&D?) time, etc. Also, the company probably wouldn't want to pay that person unless the value that person produces is higher than their wage. That being said, as a software developer I wouldn't argue with a more "reasonable" wage. :o)

Google has 1 million in revenue per employee. They could pay everyone 500,000$ / year and still be extremely profitable.

Edit: 1,259,520$ (March 31, 2015) http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=GOOG

In 2014 Apple had a pretax income of 53.48B and 92,000 employees. It could give them all a 200,000$ / year pay bump and still make 35Billion in profits.

PS: Not that any company thinks this way, but it's not hard to argue that top programmers are underpayed.

But companies have expenses other than payroll. Google has to buy machines, run datacenters, pay partners, etc. If you look at income per employee, it takes all of this into account. For Google, this is $270K: http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GOO...

So they could presumably pay everyone $250K more than they do now and still be marginally profitable.

Contract programmers.

I was one in 1989. So were many of my coworkers. Someone told me that Apple employed so many contractors so that it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees.

Hiring more contractors doesn't make a company any more money but it does help inflate the stock price in a purely artificial way.

I totally agree with this.

The main point I want to put across is that it's unfortunate that as software engineers, we have somewhat of a tendency to feel guilty for what we do earn and as a whole profession we can be prone to underselling our own value. I find the parent comment a perfect reflection of this tendency.

Also not all coders are well paid :(

I've seen this get abused a lot in some companies when they grab interns straight out of school and then convert them to F/T.

One other possibly sneaky area is when companies shift to unaccrued or "unlimited" vacation and the company puts a culture in place that discourages using that vacation. I'm fortunate to currently work in a place where the unavoidable crunch times are followed by vacation my manager almost forced me to plan to avoid burnout.

The intern -> F/T conversion usually comes with some kind of equity grant. It's not all black & white.

Maybe at a startup or possibly some big names in SV.

Vacation, as best I can tell (IANAL) doesn't really effect the rate if you are on a salary.

from http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtime.htm

If you are paid a salary, the regular rate is determined as follows:

Multiply the monthly remuneration by 12 (months) to get the annual salary. Divide the annual salary by 52 (weeks) to get the weekly salary. Divide the weekly salary by the number of legal maximum regular hours (40) to get the regular hourly rate.

It may not affect the legal definition of hourly rate for the purposes of overtime, but there is a clear difference between working 12 * 52 * 40 hours for X money, and working 12 * 47 * 40 hours for X money.

True, but the parent comment was about company culture where vacation taking was not encouraged. The number of vacation days don't appear to matter, what matters is whether there is a week where you work overtime.

The idea being, I think, that working 120 hours deserves additional compensation, whether you have a week to recover or not, and companies can't game overtime by giving you vacation days to recover. They would be better off just having you work regularly.

So? Tech occupations are almost all 100% salaried for Managerial and professional Grades.

On my first contract job I was paid a daily rate. An occasional 9th or 10th hour a day didn't bother me and I wouldn't say anything about it, but the days got longer and more regularly so I started to fill in my time sheet for 1.5 days.

The finance guy reminded me that I was on a daily rate and would be paid per calendar day of work, and it wasn't possible to get more than 1x the rate.

So I started to claim a days work every time I got a call on the weekend. Someone calls me on the weekend and I say "hit reset" or "send me an email and i'll fix it on monday"? I worked. I'm claiming my daily rate.

Those days were begrudgingly paid and I suspect it all evened out in the end.

Better pay gets confiscated in taxes for the most part, also outside Silicon Valley you can have tremendous wage insecurity, on top of that you can be owned, most employers expected literally 20 hours a day, 7 days a week work down here for 40 hours pay, when you are doing more than double overtime it starts to look more like slavery than employment.

I'm curious, where is this that it was seen acceptable to demand 140 hours a week?

Nowhere. I would say he was using hyperbole, but since he said "literally", he's straight out lying.

>also outside Silicon Valley you can have tremendous wage insecurity

Oh, puleeez. I doubt you meant it so broadly, but this comes across as having a very insular view of the tech landscape. There's really no "wage insecurity" for a decent engineer in NYC, DC area, Seattle, Boston, Raleigh-Durham, etc. etc. either (sorry if I left your awesome tech hub out..).

If anyone finds themselves in a 20h/day situation and can't find a local alternative, then you'll need to move or find a remote gig. 140h/week might happen for short sprints, but if it's sustained then you're a fool for staying.

He can demand all he likes - the point is with salaried employees is its "no fixed hours of work " and its up to you to decide how to compete your assigned tasks.

I recall one of my coworkers at BT commenting well that he was taking Friday off to play Golf as he was using up his TOIL.

If they are treating you as hourly paid you should be getting OT.

That's not true at all. An employer can demand that a salaried worker be in the office during particular hours. It just means that if those hours are > 40 per week, the worker doesn't get overtime.

MM might depend on the law in your country for BT in the UK it was xx hours per week on average.

Employers can "demand" a lot whether its justicable is another matter.

And a manager requiring attendance at say a 9 o'clock meeting is not the same as require you to be in the office 9-5 5 days a week

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