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Law Firm Fighting For White Collar (IT) Overtime
Maximum Prophet writes "Programmers and System Administrators typically don't get overtime. A law firm based in Nevada is looking to stand up for white-collar workers around the country, trying to reverse decades-old (and incorrect) thinking about what it means to work in an office. 'Computer workers of various stripes, for example, have commonly not been paid for their extra hours ... But under California law, the exemption applies only for workers whose primary function involves "the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." In numerous lawsuits, Thierman and other plaintiffs' attorneys have alleged that legions of systems engineers, help desk staff, and customer service personnel do no such thing. Of programmers, Thierman says, "Yes, they get to pick whatever code they want to write, but they don't tell you what the program does ... All they do is implement someone else's desires.'"
If you don't like the hours, don't get into the business. There are plenty of Indians that like to program too. The more we act like Detroit in the 1970s, the more we will be like Detroit in 2007.
This is my sig.
Ummm....can't RTFA, but does this refer to salaried or per-hour employees? Because there is - and always has been - a distinct difference.
Overtime is one of those things both the company and the employee has to consider when taking a job and the salary is based around those terms.
If companies suddenly had to start paying overtime, salaries would have to be adjusted.
Personally, I'd prefer to stick with the deal I have.
If you agreed to the contract you really dont have a right to bitch about it, in my experience there are just as many who pay overtime as there are that dont. My contract actually gives me time and a half for working overtime/weekends though I dont take advantage of it as much as I could. The only person in my department who gets no overtime is my manager, who at a 130 grand salary, and with nearly a months worth of vacation, I dont think he really gives a rats ass.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
It sounds like they are only doing this in California, which has ad the IT exemption for decades. For the rest of the country, IT workers were getting overtime until the so-called Fair Pay Act of 2004, which exempts IT workers (and other fields as well) from overtime, in exchange for guaranteeing overtime pay for anyone making less than about $23,000 a year. Of course, there are no IT workers making such a low wage (except in India), so that means all IT workers became affected.
I, myself was getting overtime pay until 2005.
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Ok, I'm a salaried network admin/systems technician. When I applied for my job as a systems tech, I was assured it would be an 8-5 job. Well, about 2 weeks in I am asked to handle a week of after hours calls. This is fine, except my company is in the Medical/PACS industry. If radiologists can't get their images, people could die. Some nights I will get 10+ calls. Do I get comped? No. Do I get anything for this? No. I applied to build servers and be a backup for fielding calls and was assured a certain set of hours. I did my time on helpdesk and would like to think I'd finally graduated past it. I would just like to see some sort of gratuity from the company for me having to literally go 2-3 days without sleep sometimes because of late night calls. Its bad enough when I work from 8 until 10 at night, but then to get calls most of the night after, I think I deserve something.
From a sysadmin point of view, the time spent on Service Packs, Patches and Antivirus (handling issues arising from above software) has to be the most unrewarding, thankless and useless in their careers. ... the sysadmins are just doing a job!
ZERO value addition - nothing useful learnt... except to understand how MS has found another way to screw up.
ZERO appreciation from management or users
ZERO information / guidance to complete... everything is learnt in the field - support from MS or Symantec is close to useless.
I guess if we had such items on the paycheck, the beancounters will finally notice what shitty software they are using in their Enterprise.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
If the la says overtime must be paid, contracts who say otherwise are null and void.
It's not for nothing that there are laws, because companies cannot be relied to do the right thing.
for a few years, I think companies have made out like bandits. Companies have always towed the "your a professional" line when expecting overtime from employees. While that may be true, try telling that to your plumber or mechanic. I'm wondering what the impact on general salary would be if some sort of legislation was put into place.
Sig it.
The problem is that IT are the only workers, non-professionals in the traditional sense, that are singled out as exempt from overtime, whether straight time or time and a half.
State laws, like Californias, are all based off the Federal law.
This exemption was written into the law way back in the 1970'or 80's at the behest of big corporate consulting firms based in NYC. Priot to that, IT folks were paid hourly just like most other office staff.
This is a matter of basic fairness. Why should IT be singled out for different treatment from all other technical trades?
I have been biatching about this for years. Equal treatment under the law is a Constitutional requirement in the US, and just plain ethical everywhere else.
This is also the reason why most IT offices are 40 hour weeks on paper, but 50-60 hour weeks in actuality.
All they do is implement someone else's desires -- I love this. i am no longer a programmer, bit pusher, or code grunt! I am an implementer of someone else's desires.
Please note for future reference
I think more jobs will be lost overseas while salaries will be cut or held stagnate over time to normalize programming/worker costs. That's one of the realities in our global economy. Rarely in our recent recent history have salaries simply and truly gone up across the board (accounting for true inflation).
I mean, I can the other side - companies will not hire enough people in some cases and work their salaried ones to the bone in some cases, until they are exhausted and not of any immediate use anymore.
But I think it would be better to strive to go to work for a better business that treats you better than have the government indiscrimantly burden everyone because of the sins of a few - this will definitely hamper small businesses if it goes through.
I used to work in a company that used to put a lot of pressure on the programmers to work long hours. One old guy there came at 9am and left at 5pm every day, and refused to work any later. They didn't get rid of him because he was good and reliable. In retrospect I realise all of us ambitious youngsters were being taken for a ride and the old guy just wasn't having it.
This is one of those things where the cure may be worse than the disease.
The article puts software jobs in the category of those whose primary function does not involve "the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." I have to say that this is patently false and such a misleading statement as to do damage to the profession -- essentially dumbing it down to the lowest common denominator (or least capable person) to the point of justifying off-shoring. "See, no independent judgement required! Why should we pay a decent wage for what amount to robots? Ship it overseas!"
So while you may get paid for overtime as a result, your job is now nothing more than, say, a factory worker's that does not require a degree or college education. And a profession which a large portion of the public does not understand in the first place is dumbed down -- "see, these guys really aren't so smart at all..." Oh, and good luck taking that IT / CS / etc. and moving up into management if people see your job as having nothing to do with judgement or critical thinking.
What a fucking joke IT has become! There was a time those in IT (before the dot coms and degree mills) were on par with other white collar professionals ... both in reputation and compensation. Now the industry has become something of an embarrassment to be associated with now on the level of TV repairmen and assembly line workers.
I get overtime as a coder. And I have no compunction about saying "Sorry, I'm busy this weekend, I can't do any overtime." when asked (not that I turn it down all the time, but I like to have my time off...off).
You crazy Americans with your 5 days holiday a year, 80 hour working weeks and complete lack of overtime.
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I agree that if you are offered a salary, then that's it. The job is estimated at a standard work week, you work until the job is done, and you can only expect a certain constant paycheck in return. If you have to work longer hours, suck it up, that's part of being a professional.
I also think that if the staff are hired as "contractors" for per-hour fees that are above the usual salary pay ladder, then that per-hour fee can't go into the stratosphere if the contractor works more than the standard work week. It's just a sign of a bad contract if the contractor can double-charge at whim.
What I don't agree with is the way companies will hire long-term "contract labor" for an hourly rate that matches the ambient salary (with fewer guarantees of job security or benefits), and then avoid the time-and-a-half /double-time structure for overtime pay. If the company wants me to work more than the healthy forty hours a week, rather than hire yet another IT staffer, then there should be something in it for me, and a disincentive for the company. If they really have that much extra work to do, I'd rather have them hire some help to assist me.
[
Any company led by half a brain ought to be keeping track of exactly what that paycheck is buying them, as in how much time you spend on what.
You should consider keeping track yourself and making it available to your immediate superior. Worst case it's a CYA when someone further up the line complains.
FYI - This topic is tackled in this week's Business Week.
the problem is not whether the law allows the bosses to pay or not pay for extra hours, its all about availability of workers willing to not demand for extra hours to be paid.
I mean if I start to insist on getting paid for every hour over 42h/week I work, my boss will fire me and replace me with someone that wont ask for overtime.
You don't get your overtime paid and you're OK with it?
Sounds to me like some kind of All American Madness just as college football, laugh tracks or the war on whatever.
Well, good luck with that.
This is why I like being a contractor, we get paid by the hour. If you are salaried and have a non substantial share of the company, you are getting screwed by the people making a ton of money from your labor. I think it is fair to at least be compensated for the (often tremendous) over time worked by IT and Programmers.
Who is going to pay all those folks who work on FOSS software after hours?
...is that IT departments are simply not hiring enough people to do all the work, even when the outsource overseas. We hear all the time how productivity in the United States keeps going up -- it has to! One person is expected to the work of three now, and nowhere is that more evident than in IT. Companies don't seem to realize that for a modest investment in extra staff up front, they can save the cost of projects running late and over budget, keep downtime to a minimum by having enough technical staff available to handle outages, and more importantly allow workers to have some quality of life that will make them more productive. My last job was killing me, only because for all the work that they wanted done, there were not enough resources and my having to bounce from one thing to another constantly caused me to constantly be behind, and as a result, the quality of my work suffered. Want to know why code is so buggy? Programmers working 60 hours a week when they don't have to and are not getting paid for the effort is a good place to start looking.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Sysadmin type work is NEVER simply a 9-5 type job. Why? Because so much maint has to be done during off hours. That's the way it has always been. If you have an incompetent jerk boss that decides that you need to work 9-5 everyday PLUS do off hours maint with no comp. time or anything, then that's YOUR problem. My "night maint" guys start late the day of maint, get free dinner, and only work a half-day the next day (frequently resulting in a less-than 40 hour week.)
An employer has a limited amount of money with which to compensate employees. The exact structure of counting the labor doesn't affect the pay in the long term. Long herre is about a year.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I don't know why people wait until it's too late to bitch. My former IT job I got comp time in lue of money. It was great because I ended up getting days off. I know I actually worked those days ahead of time, but getting a couple of 3 day weekends every month really boosted my moral. When they switched me and my co-workers to hourly, I still worked those hours, but instead got to bank the money. I didn't end up missing the 3 day weekends because i still had a fairly easy schedule, and the extra money went to buying another car. Now my first IT job, oh-boy was that a mess. I thought that working hard long hours would get me ahead. HA! But I figured I felt better when the company went under and I gave myself an additional severance package with the 'extra' hardware that they didn't need anymore.
Now you are on a time clock. You must account for *all* time worked. You clock in. You clock out. They watch that clock as closely as you do. You lose time when you leave early or take a long lunch.
I've done the clock. I prefer salary. I may not get overtime, but being off the *%$#&^%$* clock is just nice.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
If you read the article carefully, it actually states that:
-The law says that people must be paid for overtime
-The law says that people can sign a contract excempting them from being paid for overtime (implying, they would look at what the job demands from them as a whole, day and night, and measure the annual salary up against that). This however ONLY if they have jobs that require creative and original thought. You cannot by law sign up as a burger flipper for $20,000 per annum and be on standby days and nights with no overtime comp.
- The law firm says that IT does not require creative and original thought, and hence IT people should not be given contracts (which they almost always are) that exclude overtime
I mean, getting the argument through would be a radical shift in the salary structure of IT people - you would get paid by hour instead - but you might struggle to find people here to agree that IT support is as uncreative as burger flipping.
In New York, HR came to IT and requested job descriptions of all the IT employees; which would ultimately decide who was and was not exempt from Overtime due to the Fairpay Act. IT Mgmt complied, and must not have been told the reasons for the request, because after which 85% of IT employees, HR deemed eligible for Overtime. Not only that, we were eligible for retroactive Overtime for time work since Jan. This was in April. I earned Overtime for a full year at Sys Admin hours, all the time knowing this was never going to last. At my next review, Mgmt gave me glowing reviews and "promoted" me. They gave me a new title, which then exempt me from Overtime pay - however my job duties and hours remained the same. My base salary increased by 3%, which is standard at my company. No matter what the law says and how it is written, Mgmt will always find ways around it. But you knew that going in. No one ever went into IT for the long lunches and 35 hour work weeks. Oh, and just to put this in perspective, my brother-in-law served in the US NAVY for 12 years, has held many jobs outside of the military, has multiple degrees in engineering, currently flies passenger jets for an international airline...and he makes less than I do. For what we do, it's not that bad pay.
As far as people who don't want government involvement - there are a host of laws limiting what we can do. The Taft-Hartley law allows the government to call off any strike. States are allowed to prevent certain agreements between workers and management (a "closed shop"). Overtime, at least below a certain salary level, is one of the things countering this. If you don't care about the ITAA etc. pushing the salary level for overtime down, down, down until it disappears, all that will exist are laws that give weight to the employer, and have the government take away your freedom in contract-making with the employer (Taft-Hartley, so-called right-to-work laws etc.) Even if you want to do away with all such laws, from our perspective it makes sense to keep these laws until the ones hurting us are done away with first, as in the meantime these just balance things on our side against the laws against us.
I'm a medical student who will be graduating soon and entering residency. I hope any progress from this affects us, too - currently the AAMC (which regulates the medical residency programs) limits interns and residents to an 80 hour work week. Yes, these are the people charged with learning to save lives WHILE saving lives. 80 hours per week. Most of us will sign some utterly unfair, incomprehensible, thick as a dictionary employment agreement with our hospital that basically signs our life over to them for the next 3 to 7 years. Choice tidbits of "policy" included in these contracts mention that we may be expected to be on call for anywhere from 18 to 36 hours - on hospital grounds - multiple times per week. The 80 hours limit, while "technically" weekly is only calculated on a monthly basis. Fun times.
It's great that such important people as those who maintain our information technology infrastructure are about to get a financial boost... what about those of us earning $55,000 a year or less with 8 years+ of college and post-graduate education and charged with taking care of you and your family? Everyone envisions doctors as Corvette-driving, boat-owning, million-dollar mansion homestead people. I assure you that in today's marketplace, NOBODY goes into medicine for the money - unless they're making drugs for a big-pharm company or doing boob jobs.
...In a given week I do 15 hours of REAL actual work...? Let's be honest with ourselves. We work overtime because a LOT of what we have to do must be done during non production hours. There are some days where we're in support mode and just read websites all day...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
....but for all your MS patching needs (Windows, Office, etc), use WSUS + appropriate group-policies and delay on deploying patches to production machines until at least a week after release (sites like slashdot never seem to fail to inform when MS has screwed up a patch-batch, so there's your warning source). WSUS is a gem for seeing/testing the state of patch-deployment.
Failing that, just don't run anyone as admin and you won't have an issue anyway. Windows only really needs 100% patches guaranteed when admin rights are the norm.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Push for this change.
Seriously, just the uncertainty associated with this alone is enough to alter an employer's hiring patterns.
...if you take a job, and don't know what you're getting into, one of two things has happened.
a.) You didn't do your homework
b.) The company actively conned you.
If you're taking a job in a role that involves support, or large projects, if you're not asking whether occasional overtime is required, you're an idiot. Ask about what's typical. But most importantly, ask if you can speak to one of your prospective peers--if you don't see them in the interview, that's a bad sign. If they won't let you talk to them on request, it's a worse one. These are things you SHOULD FIND OUT. If you didn't ask, and are suddenly surprised by overtime, you get no sympathy from me.
Think about what you're willing to put up with, and how much it's worth to you. Use that in salary discussions. If the company says "Well, you're asking for $80,000, but I see your last job only paid $68,000. I'm not sure we're willing to fund such a significant jump in salary," then you have a counter of "Well, my last company had 'follow the sun' support in Australia, the UK, and US, so there was no overtime. Your company seems to average 5 hours of off-hours time per week, which includes an average of 2 weekend callouts per month." Hey, rational business discussion! Get your money. If they want you to do more work for the same salary, say "thanks for your time."
Now, I'll admit some companies pull con jobs. They will lie to people "Oh, we call people out occasionally, but it's very rare--maybe once a month" when they're calling out three times a week. If that's the case, do you really want to be working for a boss that lied to your face? I don't. But if you want to stay (need the job or whatnot), well, pull your boss aside and say "Look. When I interviewed here and negotiated a salary, I took you at your word that callouts averaged one a month. In my three months here, that's clearly not been the case. I've been called 15 times, for an average length of 3 hours. So the work I'm doing is significantly more extensive than what you agreed to pay me for. I think it's appropriate for us to re-negotiate." If they won't offer more money, they might be convinced on a comp time policy as a reasonable fair solution. Don't be judgemental about "hey, you suck, you goddamn liar!" Present facts and reasonable arguments. A fair boss can be convinced. An unfair boss? Well....no one's chained you to your oar.
People vote with their feet. If your company can't keep people, they'll pay the price for being cheap with employees. There actually are good people in the software industry who will be fair to you. The problem is that too many people are willing to put up with working for lying jerks. Or, alternatively, don't take advantage of the opportunity to find out what they're getting into and/or reasonably resolve disputes.
The idea that more jobs are going to go overseas because companies are being sued for not complying with the law is a little silly at best. Companies will try to outsource where it makes sense to their bottom line, and if they haven't outsourced it already, it probably doesn't make sense to. The article says that these laws were designed to create more jobs so that employers wouldn't work a few poor bastards to death and instead divide out the same work load to a larger number of people. I like this, and I hope companies respond to this threat with a better compensated work force. You should get paid for what you do and companies should have to comply with the law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...only the lawyers will get anything out of this. Good luck IT guys and welcome to your own corrupt mafia controlled union.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
IT Managers have no way of knowing if an IT person is productive or not. The only way they know when they are being ridiculous is when you fail.
Fail earlier and they will not push so hard.
You can make the same money working 40 hours a week as you do working 60 hours a week (6 figures +).
Oh-- and those indian programmers got 10% more expensive last week in one day because of currency changes. And we have at least two more interest cuts on the way that will damage the currency but save a lot of homeowners so further currency depreciation is likely. I recently saw a burn rate for Infosys personnel from a project estimate. For onshore resources they are now more expensive ($65/hr + $1k a month housing allowance) than US resources including our benefits.
I think the great offshoring wave is going to stop quickly now... and maybe our wages will start recovering.
The fact is good trained experienced programmers are worth $100k regardless of the nation they are sitting in. As a result of that fact, labor costs in india and china have been going up 40% a year before you take into account the dollar dropping and their currencies rising.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's really necessary for something to be done about the current environment for IT people. I've been hit by this at several jobs and it really sucked. The worst are integration companies, where you are paid a salary but billed to the client hourly. Deadlines and workloads are setup such that the "engineer" is expected to work 60 - 80 hour weeks for a flat rate salary while the company is being paid for the service, often at an "overtime" rate.
And woe be the guy who isn't back in the office again at 8 AM sharp after working on a project until 1:00 am the day before. I've been threatened with losing pay and even possible termination for just that very thing.
I know this is Slashdot, and people like to pretend only sysadmins post here. But I have to ask, why just IT? I'm a graphic designer for a firm. I'm paid a decent salary and I like my work -- I don't have anything to complain about. But I do work weekends and late nights, all the freaking time. Much like the description of the programmer, I slog long hours implementing other people's whims.
Yes, of course I could freelance, and maybe someday I will. But, like many -- MANY -- salaried white collar workers, I put in absurd hours doing work for people who are paid 10 times as much as me and work one tenth as hard. All I want is some kind of acknowledgment for the hours I put in beyond 40.
I know people who work for aerospace who ( and this may not be normal ) get paid overtime. These people are programmers, engineers -- well educated. But if they work one minute past 40 hours, they get paid extra on top of salary. This is *great*. The employee is rewarded, and the company is punished. The company, if it sees a lot of overtime has an incentive to hire. This way, employees -- who are in fact human beings with friends and family -- get to live their lives.
My company, on the other hand, is rewarded when I have to work overtime. They get to charge the client for all my hours of work, and best of all, they get to keep that money, since I'm paid strictly as if I worked 40 per week.
But now, the slashdot conservative free market horde is going to scream that I'm a commie pinko, etc etc. I don't care, I think quality of life matters.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
But when one starts to push it a bit farther and point out to the so-called intelligensia that they are wilfully lying down and getting screwed by The Man, then everyone gets all touchy and pissy and the mods start in with Troll or Overrated or Flamebait ratings because the point hits close to home. And this happens in "the Real World" as well as this little nest of geeks here at Slashdot.
People were litereally shot dead for the right to a weekend. This is all extremely well documented, even wikipedia documents a few examples.
So, when people cheerfully surrender to the Boss to do unpaid overtime, they are completely disrespecting the sacrifice of countless millions of people who have struggled to turn our society into something other than cheap wage slavery and a race to the bottom to benefit the few.
So, it's about fucking time IT professionals grew a spine and started demanding their rights. And if the jobs get offshored, then organise the offshore workers as well. No one deserves to be exploited, and we can, by co-operative direct action, invent a better world for ourselves and our descendants. It just takes the ability to see oneself as a responsible citizen in an active democracy, instead of a mindless taxpayer/consumer who pays for services.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
HOORAY, lets get some lawyers involved.
Or maybe we can have the UAW represent us. (And be on strike every other year and laid off the rest of the time.)
I have had programming jobs where I made time and a half for overtime, others where I didn't.
In jobs where I didn't have overtime, I simply didn't work any.
If they expected me to work unpaid time, I just got another job.
I love my job so much now I would work for free, (but don't tell my boss).
Getting lawyers/lawmakers/unions into the mix is just gonna foul things up, if you don't get paid for the time you work, then get a job where you do.
That is the logical conclusion if you keep pushing for the same 'rights' that regular hourly workers have. Then god help the industry as it will collapse under its own weight.
Note: I'm not against unions in the right situations as they do have their place. The IT field just isn't one of those situations.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This law puts IT workers back with blue collar workers. Your g/f (right!) is not required to get OT pay. Period. Engineers are universally considered exempt employees. Nurses may or may not be specifically exempt, but the market is such that they can walk at any moment and get a job somewhere else.
Make IT workers really hard to find (like nurses), and you'll see a shift. There are too many hacks out there, though, and no real state-regulated certification process (like nurses, accountants, engineers, doctors, etc.), so there will always be a glut of IT hacks available that you'll need to compete with.
You'll probably also notice that the best and brightest in just about every field will find a job where overtime is compensated. Those who have the wherewithal to compete will get the better benefits. If you're just taking what's available, you may not get your best compensation package.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Staying late when the project is due if you are behind, is part of the job description. At 33, I work 9 to 5, and I've gotten very good at not letting this happen.
I can understand creating a law to protect IT workers, but honestly, we would all be better off protecting ourselves by managing our time and expectations of the business properly.
or do less or stop doing stuff "just because we can". Reduce C*O salaries and bonuses. Plenty of ways to work this. It's just you don't want to.
Sorry, I think there's a simpler answer to the question, "Why shouldn't people get paid for the hours they work?" It's because the hours you work aren't valuable, it's only the result of that labor that's valuable. We [should] get paid because we're doing something valuable, NOT because we spent a certain amount of time doing it. Historically, time spent has been used as a way to measure value, because it's an easy way to measure the amount of work done. When the work being done is so standardized that there's no way for one person to do more than another in the same amount of time, hours provides a good measurement. However, it has only ever been an approximation.
I'm totally against any govenment intervention in how I get paid because I know that I am more productive than almost anyone I work with. And while my greater productivity doesn't always result in my getting paid as much as I think I should get, the fact that my pay is more based on my getting the work done than on spending a certain amount of time doing means that there is a possible upside, and at least it means I have some flexibility. I can read slashdot during the day, for example, because I know I'll still be able to get my work done.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
Sounds good to me and according to my calculations most 10 year IT vets should be getting between 250,000 and 750,000 in back pay.
Got Code?
The burger flippers of IT.
So, they do exist.
The notion down in the US seems to favour the company far more than the worker as opposed to where I am (Manitoba Canada). Here in Manitoba, the only exemptions to paying overtime involve management, which is specifically defined as having the power to hire and fire, control your own work and discipline others as well as control your own hours. For everyone else, including salaried employees, the exemption where you don't get paid occurs only if you make more than 2-1/2 times the industrial average in the jurisdiction.
The introduction of these laws came after a worker successfully sued their employer over unpaid overtime and the terms under which she was hired. The terms being vague, essentially meant that because she was salaried, she could be compelled theoretically to work 24/7 with no compensation for the extra hours. The court found this unacceptable. Further review by the province found that the number of people in similar situations was huge and this was remedied this spring through legislation.
I find it interesting that in the US, there is not even a legal requirement to pay vacation for full time workers. I find it more interesting that many individuals in these replies seem to support the work until you drop mentality. I also find it interesting that apparently down in the US, your employer can walk up to a desk clerk and force them to pee in a bottle for them. Talk about intrusive. Weird, people don't seem to care about that, but are wound up over google taking picures of people in the street who no one will ever likely recognize or know.
I would think there should be some fairness in how companies treat workers.
There's not a spit of difference between guys selling the Union or the guys selling USA PATRIOT ACT. Both depend on this idea that we are completely powerless, so we need to get some goons to protect us, and furthermore, we should just give these jerks, in the form of dues or taxes, protection money. You know what a union is? It's a steward who just got a nice deck for his house, a president's kid's baseball team that got new uniforms, and any manner of theft.
The simple matter of the truth is, unions don't work. Unions don't work because, every time you give them what they claim to get, they either drive the parent company bankrupt, like GM and a cast of thousands, or the work goes overseas. The promise is a lie, and all a union really does is just place a tax based on a fear. Unions don't work because the customer doesn't care what happens to the people that produce a product.
How many of you, Americans, out there, lamenting the death of the Union, have bought an American car in the last decade? I bet a dang view... bunch of uber geeks saying how your Japanese or German car is better. Well, good for you, but don't be sitting their trying to square your social treason on the rest with your guilt trips about capitalism and unions. If you want American companies to succeed, then buy American products. It's that simple.
Today, all of these "workers" advocates are just in the business of helping themselves. They work by frightening people into giving them money for promises that they can't keep, and have no intention of keeping. It's just like the "people's lawyer", the guy that sues some company for a billion dollars - he gets millions, while his plaintiffs get coupons. Workers rights is a slogan for an industry based on extortion, and fear.
I am not afraid.
This is my sig.
A bit of a chip on the shoulder, but the bottom half is right on. They simply can't teach all of the sacrifices made by the labor movement. It's too great a lesson in organization and fighting for change from the bottom up.
To show you how the badly the american worker has screwed themselves, Ken Burns couldn't get the financing for an hours worth of his blockbuster documentaries on the Labor movement, much less find anyone but a few Communists to watch it.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
So do Construction workers, but they get overtime.
Sysadmin work isn't that dissimilar from other infrastructure work in that regard.
Plumbers, electricians, maintenance guys -- they've all got the same basic gig: sometimes there's not much to do. Some times there's alot. Most times there's big stuff to do, you have to do it off-hours.
So why should some of these jobs be entitled to legal protection and others left to fend for themselves?
It's great that your guys are taken care of.
It's not so great that such environments are the exception.
Yeah, man. The only people who deserve a pay increase are CEO's. God, everyone knows that
Did I say that? No, if you want more money, do something with some value to it. Don't be sitting there pretending that all you have to do is fork over some crap and get a ton of money because breathe. Be more entreprenuial, and don't blame your failings on someone else's success. It's a CEO's fault you're a loser.
This is my sig.
We [should] get paid because we're doing something valuable
That's very short-term thinking that is harmful.
If I'm the mightiest tech employer in the U.S. and I say I'm paying too much for you and you are earning $30k/yr, now what? Corporations typically exploit your thinking by doing just that.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
FTFY.
I don't view this as a good thing. I've had jobs where I punched a clock. Yes, I got paid for every hour and part there of I was clocked in. Yes, I could punch out at the same time every day. But I also had to punch in by the same time every day--1 minute late is as good as an hour. Same goes for getting back from lunch.
In my current sallaried position, I don't sweat the evenings I stay late as long my boss doesn't hassle me about the mornings I'm a little late or the days I need a long lunch to take care of an errand or two.
And like the parent poster says, you won't start with your current sallary as a 40-hour base and add overtime to that. If you routinely work 60-hr weeks (and the bosses know this) more likely your base will be 2/3 of your current sallary. You'll need to keep up those 60-hr weeks to keep your pay at the same level (not even considering that paid holidays and vacation will be based on an 8-hr day so you'll either lose the overtime you might have worked those days or have to make the time up to keep your pay at the same level.)
If you spend too much time at the office, getting paid overtime isn't going to help you. If your bosses make unrealisitic demands making long overtime necessary, getting paid overtime isn't going to help you. It'll just give you one more thing to complain about. "Man, I wish I was on sallary so I didn't have to punch that clock."
Companies get rich off the time their IT staff spends posting to /. during work hours.
Attention angry, money-hungry lawyers promoting this lawsuit: Please do not "help" me. Thanks!
That is all.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Perhaps if you had actually driven a bus for a while, you might not say that. I worked my way through school as a bus drive in Seattle. I loved driving a bus. My quality of life was better driving a bus than working in IT/tech.
I am considering leaving the IT/tech field and moving back to Seattle and getting another bus driving job with Metro.
Again, quality of life.
FYI, the city of Seattle has the highest educated bus driving workforce in the country. Many students work their way through a degree at the UW by driving a bus. When they graduate they often realize that finding work in their field doesn't pay as much as driving a bus. Top scale is $25 or so, and overtime is paid time and a half. Next time you work a 60 hour week, think about the fact that bus drives are getting paid the same if they work that much. With a degree, bus drivers can move into management, which pays more.
And there's that quality of life thing again. If you don't want the overtime, if you want to do something with your free time, like flip houses, you have that choice. (I knew two bus drivers who owned apartment building together.) In IT/tech, you're forced to work 50-60 hour weeks.
I blame my generation (baby boomers) for the expectation of 50-60 hour weeks in IT. Screw that.
Best regards.
And while they're at it, they should get law-guaranteed overtime for my wife (who is an accountant), too. Otherwise there's just too much leeway for shitty management.
"Sure we can make a few mistakes here and there, we'll just force the peons to work weekends for a month before a major deadline while we kick back with a beer at home. Oh, and we'll book them at 130% capacity, so that they work 10-12 hour days during "non crunch" time, too. Ourselves, we'll work 9 to 5, of course, most of the time 10 to 4, actually."
In the lawyerly search for black-and-white distinguishing criteria for who is doing creative or managerial work vs. who is a mere crank-turning technician, government apparently looks to its own qualification criteria: immigration preference, and "qualified personnel" clauses from government contracting (a field where one finds that great exception, unionized engineers).
It could be argued that this has an effect of age discrimination, in that years ago it was much more common than now to be able to enter the computing field without having a CS degree, or any degree at all. It could be further argued that companies are quite willing to go along with this, because it provides a path to displace older and higher-priced IT workers (by reclassifying them to lower-paid status), while maintaining some defense against age discrimination claims.
At my former employer (Fortune 500 technology company), I was at the second-highest step on the technical career ladder (yes, we all know that ladder is built of smoke, supported by mirrors). After whatever lawyering fad resulted in the new spin on FLSA, the company issued HR policy that said in effect that I could not have been hired for any engineering position. Their interpretation of the computer-related-fields exemption included only management information systems and networks, and not product design and development engineering.
As might be expected, this company is a leader in H1B visa use, and in moving work offshore.
I worked for a medical device manufacturer in the 90's and they had a small NOC of about 4 people (2 sysadmins and 2 techs). As fate would have it the 2 sysadmins both found alternate employment about the same time so they offered one of the techs a "promotion" to sysadmin. During the meeting to discuss the promotion the tech was given the terms of his role as the new sysadmin. He looked it over, started laughing and handed the proposal back to them. When they asked why he was laughing he replied "I make more than that now!". Techs were Salaried Non-Exempt and eligible for overtime whereas sysadmins were straight salary.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You speak on and on about fear mongering but all you do not give a single rational argument against unions. All you do is try to associate a simple, healthy, life improving initiative that aims to protect worker's rights with evil, oppressive initiatives like the US's patriot act. If that wasn't enough to satisfy your trolling needs, you go on associating unions with organized crime and corruption.
The thing is, whenever a group of people join themselves to fight for their rights, their lives improve and society improves. History is packed with landmark victories accomplished by people associating themselves and fighting for their rights. You absolutely cannot state that a bunch of IT workers organizing themselves to fight to get their a fair pay earned by their honest work is some sort of evil, oppressive, criminal, abusive act.
You may have been brainwashed against the evils of communism and you may have lost the ability to understand the concept of worker's rights but that doesn't mean that it is wrong or evil.
Oh I see. That must be why there is absolutely no european company. They simply cannot survive under that harsh climate. Damn those european unions, with their minimum wage, their 35 hour work weeks, their paid overtime, their 30 day paid vacations, their Christmas bonus and paid leaves, their national health services and their unemployment benefits. They simply destroyed their lives and reverted back to the stoneage! No small company can possibly survive that, let alone a multinational. Poor bastards.
Yes, you seem to be the smart one here. You completely avoid all unions or worker's association and nonetheless you still got that 35 hour work week and paid overtime. Oh you don't have that? Tough. Keep on bitching about how unions are evil, then.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
So, you want to be subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act (rather than "exempt")? Then be prepared to be at your desk for an actual 8 hours (minus two 15 minute breaks and one 30 minute lunch break). Be prepared to punch in and account for every minute of your time. Be prepared to be a glorified custodial worker...
Don't bitch about what you've got, until you realize what you COULD have.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
There is no payment scheme which cannot be abused by both the employer and the employee, so forcing employers to use a different scheme will not make those who have abused their employees stop; it will just change the way they abuse.
Just to make up a relevent example, a software company who has previously been forcing 80 hour weeks on programmers during crunch time might, in the face of this law, hire twice as many programmers, but give them all very few hours except during crunch time. So now instead of being over worked, they are under paid.
This assumes that it's OK for the government to insert itself in a private agreement between employer and employee in the first place, which is blatantly false.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
YOU are an idiot.
When a company unionizes, it has to pay its staff a living wage and good benefits. This reduces the company's profit, certainly, but doesn't wipe it out.
The company DOES NOT HAVE THE OPTION of raising prices to cover the cost, because it can ONLY raise prices as high as the market will allow.
The result of this situation is that the company's profits get squeezed -- which only hurts a bunch of rich assholes at the top (and nobody likes them anyway).
Quit your astroturfing, rich boy. Nobody cares about your pissy little problems.
In other story: a New York law firm, specializing in mergers and aquisition has just passed the $1,000.00 fee per billable hour.
IT workers, especially the ones, running infrastructure for corporations should have an organizations representing them, including wage and overtime negotiations. Business leaders don't recognise and are not willing to give the credit for IT to the same extent as other professions.
At each job I've had (I'm on my morning break right now), it's been that way, and I'm overtime exempt. So I don't see how getting the upsides of what I'm already getting the downsides of constitutes a bad thing.
Working in Alberta's IT industry seems pretty much the same as the US. All of coders and administrators in our shop are exempt and completed a drug test to get the job. Only diff is the number of holiday and vacation days a year. The day my employment starts looking like a union gig, I'm moving on.
Issues and attitudes like this only speed the decline of North America's leadership in the world. Both countries were founded on innovation and hard work. Canada's so-called "progressive" labour laws (and a crappy healthcare system) are leading the way down the tubes, they cause business to find other sources.
Employment is a privilege not a right. If you don't like your job get another one.....or like my lazy ass cousin just live off the taxpayers.....oh man don't get me started.
aarrghh!
I worked for years doing the salary and 80 hrs/wk thing like many here seem to be doing. Recently I moved to Ak where there is a state law that requires I.T. people to be hourly. I'm a net admin and my boss the I.T. manager is also hourly. Guess what... there are very few "emergencies" after 5pm. Huh, imagine that! I'm off at 5pm and my weekends are mine. Don't let em fool ya! Unless you make well over 100k they are sucking the life out of you.
I will take that over being at my desk for 8-10 hours a day with barely a lunch break and then being on call and/or having to work from home because management can get away with it. After all, they can always outsource to India or bring in an H1B who is willing to work like that because they plan on going back to India in a couple of years.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"...I know people who work for aerospace who ( and this may not be normal ) get paid overtime..."
I am an engineer in aerospace. I'm classified salaried OT exempt, but still get paid overtime because of union contract agreements. It isn't 1.5 time, OT is billed as straight hourly plus an additional pittance, but at least it is extra pay. When on call, I get to bill any received phone calls as logged OT. Pretty good huh?
Down sides you say? Of course there are. As part of a negotiated union contract, I have zero merit based pay raises or bonuses and no control over my future salary. I am locked into a formulaic pay raise schedule and even if my boss wanted to pay me more for doing a kick-ass job (or pay the lazy desk-nappers less), the union contract wouldn't allow it.
Of course I could always flip to independent contractor, but then I have to manage all of my health benefits, insurance, etc which may or may not end up equitable in the long run.
*shrug* I get to work on cool stuff though, and get paid average-to-decent, so all things considered I can't really complain.
----- And all that the Lorax left here in this mess was a small pile of rocks, with one word...UNLESS.
Personally I don't want to wait until I'm a used up has-been to enjoy my money.
Money isn't an end in and of itself, you know, it's just a way of facilitating other things, like quality of life.
With a 37 hour week and 30 days (plus public holidays), I prefer my way to yours.
I'm sorry you can't find a job in your field. I live in Miami. There are plenty of jobs here. Of Course, the cost of living is exceptionally high. The sheer number of immigrants here keep driving wages down. Linux admin positions here want to pay you $40k a year. If I lived up north or out west, I could get double that.
The real problem isn't government in these situations. It's corporate mentality.
Corporate managers just don't respect what we do. They think that we should be producing something. They think that we're expendable.
So, they want us to work on salary, which in Miami is low, and put out fires all hours of the night for free.
The real problem for us is that we can't really do much on production boxes during work hours.
Some firms are smart enough to have two shifts to cover all hours. Others just want you to fix it on your time.
The salary model works great if you're an accountant. It doesn't work that well for IT.
Ignoring the problem isn't going to fix it, for any of us. If there were sane rules for IT workers, it would benefit us all. Including you.
Unionization is their greatest fear. This looks bad on those of us who are trying to shed that "shift worker" stigma. We're fighting hard to be seen as professionals. Our working hours are just longer than that of most other professionals.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Seriously though, you point out that 'in this day and age' there is no loyalty on either side. I'd say that's partially a reflection of the unwillingness of workers to ask for (demand?) what they're worth. Labor is a business transaction, you shouldn't hate your business partners or let them treat you 'unfairly'. Get a good idea if what you should be paid, ask for it, and leave if you don't get it.
You know where workers are getting it from? They just look at the executives of the companies and see them getting paid BIG bucks - way more than they probably should. And see them stealing peoples money (Enron, Worldcom etc...) and bascially getting away with it. How many executives are doing it and NOT getting caught? Probably A lot more than you think! So if the executives are doing it why shouldn't the employees - think about it. You have the RIAA/MPAA stealing from "artists" and US the people who actually buy their crap!
Think about it we have a double standard. The big rich executives get paid WAY too much steal from others and it's ok. But it's not ok for use to get paid well for our hard work and it's not ok for us to steal from them. Companies would rather outsource to some other country whos workers are willing to work for dimes on the dollar than to pay people decently. To me let those FUCKING companies move their business overseas, take the jobs with them and then let the rest of the U.S. QUIT using their products and services. Some other company will just come up and take their place. Maybe learning from the previous companies mistakes.
If the cost of living in the U.S. wasn't so high I bet people wouldn't need such higher salaries. What is the cost of living in India? A LOT lower than it is here, hence they can get away with needing less pay. Corporations don't get this AT ALL. If they would help bring the cost of living DOWN in the U.S. I would bet people would be willing to work for less. how can we compete in a "GLobal Economy" if everywhere companies are sending jobs has far lower costs of living than we do.
But I think corporate EXECUTIVES need to get a pay cut! NO! they would rather "lay off" hundreds or thousands of employees just so they can keep their cushy job, getting paid millions of dollars and getting millions of dollars in stock options. That's utter CRAP! They say "oh we need to pay them well to keep them." BULLSHIT! If you get rid of one executive there is ALWAYS another wiating in line for his job! MBA's are a DIME A FUCKING DOZEN! Engineers are NOT! If anything Engineers and scientist should be making more than MBA exeuctives!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
That's of course assuming that the only thing that matters is the price of the product and that little things like the actual characteristics of the product don't mean anything.
OTOH, people still buy crappy american cars...
The problem with a company that needs a Union in order to treat it's employees well is no the Union but the fact that the company is prone to abuse people in general. They will treat you in the same manner as their employees.
That is why they need some sort of "price advantage".
They don't have another one.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Hahahaha. You know, it is the federal law that makes sure you get paid more than $3.00 per hour to mop those floors.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
They tried all kinds of things (where things are defined as 'things that don't involve spending money or anyone working less) to increase employee morale as people began to leave the company like a sinking ship, so I can honestly say that we did have a Hawaiian shirt day. I don't think it was Friday, though. Last Tuesday of the month or something ridiculous like that.
A good friend of mine used to always say that no experience in that life was that bad if you got a good story to tell out of it. From that perspective, even the worst parts of my career haven't been that bad.
That's not a proper business perspective. The company isn't "punished", it's disincentivized (wheee! I love businessspeak!)
Basically, businesses can get extra labor, but they have to pay for it, just like they have to pay if they want more towels in the executive washroom. It's not really such a bad deal, since - barring mandatory overtime issues - the worker has an incentive to put in those all-important extra hours (hey, producing code is like making hamburger right? The longer you run the machine the more you get????). However, the company has to budget for the the expense; it's no longer a freebie.
Eventually, especially at time-and-a-half, it becomes more economical to add more staff (or another hamburger grinder). So, like augmenting staff with contract employees, companies get the flexibility to boost hours for short-term needs, but for longer-term needs, they end up putting more people to work.
Not exactly win/win, but it evens out the pains levels to something more equitable.
I just don't find it as interesting as the rest of my life. If you do then you're in a tiny, tiny minority of people, even in the US.
Would you do your job by choice if you didn't have to? If you didn't need the money?
I'd probably write open source software as a hobby, sure, but I wouldn't do it 37 hours a week, let alone however many the folks complaining about unpaid overtime here
"As for vacations, well I plan to take a many month long vacation in a couple years"
Again, tiny minority, how many folks are EVER in a position to give up their employment to do that? When they have families to support? Very very few. If you can do that then well done, but don't pretend for a second that that's representative.
If he really wanted it, he could be doing the work he want's to be doing.
It's the internet. I have done work on the other side of the world.
He's just a whiner
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
*which are just plain stupid, really, since the cost of those benefits could be part of your salary instead and YOU could decide what do do with it. There's a reason benefits exist, and it doesn't have anything to do with workers rights. It has to do with a worker shortage during a period where salaries were capped.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think the should make 350K a year salary, the rest on a bonus.
I have no problem paying someone 75 million dollars if they make me a Billion dollars.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People who think for a living don't get paid by the hour, but instead for doing their job. Why reward people who take more time to do the same task by paying them overtime. On the other hand, if the work load is unreasonable, you can ask for help, or quit, if it's unfair.
Why must I suffer as an IT professional because your lack of management forethought. If we are a 24x7x365 company, act like one. Spread the work to multiple shifts. I volunteered to work a night/later shift. I was denied because we are an 8 to 5 company. Well then why am I putting in 8 hours during the day just so I can schedule my real work for a 3am maintenance window that night, and then they would really like you to be back to work at 8am. Companies don't change unless it's painful for them not to change, or the government tells them to. Your forgetting that we are the little guy and the company is the big guy we have no power. my 2 cents
there are a list of, I believe, 10 rules the IRS and the courts use as a guidline to determine if you are contract, or an employee. Regardless of any agreement.
The reason for that is many corporations abused their position, and started making employees be contracts at a sub standard rate, avoid benefits and taxes.
Basically the rules are that is you are told when to show up, where to sit, what computer to use, are not given specific task to COMPLETE, you are an employee.
The biggest determining factor is that as a contractor, you are allowed to sub contract your work.
They are guidelines, but if you are a contractor I highly recommend you familiarize your self with them.
OT would be great. It would start putting real numbers on projects, and that is how you get correct staffing, and budget. That will actually improve a corporations mentality on projects, deadlines, and bonuses.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Scaremongering nothing. Union ties with organized crime as well as featherbedding and threats and violence towards scabs are pretty well established.
What lies will you tell to cover that up?
Did anyone read TFA? Apparently IBM *really* doesn't want to pay overtime . . .
"Already the settlements are rolling in. Siebel Systems has agreed to pay $27.5 million to about 800 software engineers, and IBM is fucking over $65 million to technical and customer support workers."
It might be interesting to watch.
Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
That's of course assuming that the only thing that matters is the price of the product and that little things like the actual characteristics of the product don't mean anything.
OTOH, people still buy crappy american cars...
It all goes together. If you are in favor of unions so much, then you should accept a potentially lower quality product you are getting in exchange for a greater social world, in your eyes. If you have to have the Japanese car, because they are "so much better", and really, they aren't, then, you really don't have any right to lament the death of the union, because you are the cause of their death. How somebody votes does not matter nearly so much to the UAW as what kind of car you buy.
This is my sig.
I know a lot of people that don't branch out specifically because the cost of health care for the family prevent it.
I could go work for a small start up, one that I believe will be very successful, right now. But the risk is to high. If we get decent nation wide health care, I will start my own business within a month. Even at a higher tax. I know many people in the same situation.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
About a year ago, there was a finding that the institution I work for had misclassified about 300 positions, including mine, and we should be eligible for overtime pay. I'm a sysadmin, DBA and a few other things. We are also now eligible for membership in the union. I did, in fact, decide to join the union, mainly because of one particularly bad manager, who is going to become my direct supervisor starting in a few months. Most of the people who I work with are fine people but this manager is well known to have had problems with many employees.
It is also interesting to note that salaries do seem to be being passively adjusted because of the change. June is the time that we typically get pay raises and every year, up until this one, there were both general pay raises (which essentially adjust for market conditions, inflation and cost of living) and merit pay raises. This year, after the overtime decision, there were only merit pay raises.
...and fortunately I just turned 40, so I can actually half-sort-of claim to be old, too.
I took a job at a small business consultancy and found myself IMMEDIATELY pressured to work for free after hours (returning emails, looking over proposals, as well as some miscellaneous work that had to be done after hours like reboots). Most of the pressure of course came from the principals, who have the most to gain from "extra" work.
I pushed back immediately, not answering phone calls or email after 5, when asked when I would look at something not related to on-site client work, I'd schedule time during the day to do it vs. doing it at home after hours.
Strangely enough, the only place where one of the principals complained was about daycare pickups when my wife was out of town! He actually had the gall to ask me what I would do if a client site was down or having problems and I had to pickup my kid -- I told him "Easy question -- I don't even have to think about it. My son comes first, every time." He kept it up, suggesting I should have a "backup" plan with friends or neighbors in case I had to work, and I just told him to "Put any further suggestions about my child's welfare in writing along with any repercussions should I fail to follow them."
I'm not sure such a written letter would have done much for me, but I can only imagine how it might have gone over should a situation have ever reached court or had I filed for unemployment claiming I had been terminated without cause.
But since then, nothings happened and both principals have been pretty conscientious about work/life balance. In fact in my last performance review, I made the point explicitly that the job lacked the compensation or advancement to merit becoming a 60 hour a week job and they pretty much agreed with me.
I just think it pays to work hard during the day and then ignore them after hours.
Sounds like heaven compared to sitting down at my desk at 7:00 am. Then working until noon, taking 5 mins to get my lunch from the refrigerator and heating it up, then eating it at my desk. Followed by working straight through until 6:00 PM or so. Only to be on call if anything 'comes up' that evening.
$70,000 a year is based on a 40 hour work week. If your working 60 hour weeks or more, you are probably worse off THAN a custodial worker. With more stress, and less family face time.
Do not try to make us think 'exempt' is better until you have not seen your kid for three days due to 'crunch' time.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
When was the last time the government came in and _solved_ a problem?
How about the national highway system, the 14th amendment, water and air quality laws and OSHA as a few examples of Government solutions that solved national problems. They fixed the problems so well that you no longer notice that there were problems there in the first place. Legislation isn't the solution to everything but don't pretend it can't fix anything.
And let's pay our CEO $billions while we're at it and call it a day.
There's a balance here somewhere but some days I fear we've tipped the scale too far. Does a 50 hour work week and another 10-20 commuting really equal out with the "better" life we all live now compared with 20 years ago? I work, live, and breath technology. I often wonder if I'd be happier with the white picked and a simpler life in the 60s or 70s.
Hell, at least there wouldn't be as many rules to protect stupid people from themselves. Oh, and a bit of honesty and integrity in people too. I remember seeing a bit of that when i was younger.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I'm a developer and I think the definition that most programmers get to exercise independent judgment. Especially for higher levels of staff/senior and principle engineers.
Now the poor people who have to work help desk 10 hours a day and not get paid for it, that's a total rip off. The biggest thing is when you work help desk you don't get to choose your hours (unlike most programmers) or what you work on (sometimes it's tough for help desk to take breaks). Same goes for all support oriented IT fields, you're often stuck on the phone or running from building to building to put out various fires. And the first thing a company does when it is short on funds is cut these groups and make everyone work overtime, while the job market is good it is not so bad. But when the economy slumps I see these people getting hit hard with overtime.
QA/Testing should also get paid overtime, but I don't think it should be legally enforced. it's in a company's best interest to minimize the wild fluctuations that the testing group has. And to put them on a more even keel with proper scheduling and planing of a project. Most shops the QA guys are feast or famine, not much work or way way too much work to do. Continuous integration and many small internal releases improves software quality and it lets QA build up their tests and have less work to do at the end of the release cycle. (because tests that pass are a magnitude less work than tests that fail). Lots and lots of good/complete tests that pass at the end of the final release is a good thing.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The GP may have made horrible points trying to attack unions, but that doesn't make them paragons of virtue and light. A friend told me an excellent story about his firm. He works at a financial company, and they were doing some major renovation on their building. They went out and asked for bids, and the union of carpenters in the area refused to submit a bid. So, they went with non-union work, and now the union is picketing them for not hiring union labor. Now, it isn't the actual workers, or union leaders who are picketing: they hired homeless people to picket for them (probably for well below minimum wage, too). Meanwhile, their representatives aren't getting the paid work (the company would have been willing to pay more for union work), but the union leaders are still collecting their union dues. Nice how that works, isn't it?
Unions serve a very important purpose, but we need to make sure we don't defend them for using the same sort of jerk tactics their employers used to. You hear a lot about how unions make employers less likely to hire people, because of all the crap they have to put up with (like tons of red tape about firing people, wages higher than the worth of the work, etc), and we should remember this sort of thing before praising them unilaterally. There should be a balance of power between unions and employers for things to be good.
You make it sound like Unions ruined the American Auto industry.
They were wankers from the very beginning starting with Ford.
Unionization just kept management from getting too far out of hand.
It would make far more sense to cut off the corporate welfare and just let the old Dinosaurs die.
Ultimately, the Union is irrelevant. The idiocy starts at the top and always has.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> If you have to have the Japanese car, because they are "so much better", and really, they aren't
And another thing...
I can as a matter of routine expect any Japanese car or a German or Scandinavian one to easily
last me 200 thousand miles. I will be fortunate to get 70 thousand out of the American equivalent.
There was a time when people pined for 25 year old Benz'es so they could fix them up and have a
cheap Benz.
Benz being associated with Chrysler pretty much killed that.
Much like Microsoft, it isn't so much that one particular set of alternate vendors from a particular
nation are better but that ALL OF THEM ARE.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
GM has not declared bankruptcy. They are doing a good job of pretending to be bankrupt to win concessions from the Unions though.
A few years ago, California amended its overtime law - it was to give nurses overtime pay but also encompassed IT contractors the way it was worded - companies had to pay time and a half and double time if over 40 hrs. A senate bill was then introduced to take IT contractors out (or limit it to lower paid IT workers but while that bill was making its way thru the CA legislature, contractors had to be paid for overtime.
What my company did - a major auto company - was mandate that there would be no overtime for any contractors - you COULD NOT work more than 40 hrs ever, under any circumstances. This was an edict from executive management.
What this meant is that if you were close to 40 hrs and there was the possibility that you might get called on a problem at night or on the weekend, you had to go home early so the contractors affected worked more like 30 hrs a week instead of 40 on the fear that they might go over 40 if they got called. One guy who had worked on a problem the night before, came into work and was told he had to go home. Now this guy lived 60+ miles away and carpooled every day to work. He had to leave work, go call his wife (who also worked a long way away) to come pick him up because his carpool partners at work weren't sent home. The couple of months this chaos lasted caused huge confusion, you couldn't carpool with contractors because they might get sent home early and the contractors losing money due to not being able to work 40 hrs.
It is a HUGE CAN OF WORMS!
NO NO NO.
I thought this was already common in IT. 3 of the last 4 companies I worked with expected you to log your time, usually in 15 minute increments, so that the appropriate customer or business unit could be billed. And there is no charge center for "downtime".
Ummm.... that's what I do now and still don't get overtime pay when my employer does get paid for the work that I do during the non-paid period.
I worked for a private Seattle based investment management company. I started as a Help Desk tech that was hourly plus OT, then changed jobs to an Executive Level Support technician and they changed me back to Salary. I said fine, and they paid me close to my current combined wages plus OT and I took it. After several years in that roll the HR dept realized how much they were breaking the law when I kept documenting my hours worked, that sometimes reached 120 hrs per week on occasion. I would total my hours on the yearly performance reviews so that it was recorded. Needless to say out of the blue they payed me out a 60K bonus and changed me back to Salery plus OT. Some times it takes the fear of getting sued to change their ways. I have had several other jobs since then and will not take an IT job that doesn't pay for my OT.
Unionization just kept management from getting too far out of hand.
Well, no. Unions blocked management from altering work rules from a taylor process into a lean process until it was way too late for most American manufacturing companies. Basically, in a classic union shop, you have a certain tool guy, and that is HIS job, and no one else can do it, and he can't be made to do something else. That's what was thought was efficient in 1930, but it turned out to be terrible in 1980, when the Japanese came up with work teams and a more holistic view of assembly. Those American companies that could adopt that technique survived and prospered, and those that couldn't died. Programmers, for example, operate under a management model, in a good shop, that was essentially how the japanese make cars. So we're the beneficiaries of a new understanding of flexible labor.
That's not to say management didn't make bad decisions. They made some doozies. GM's CEO of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a total disaster. But GM, even today, was always guided more about trying to fit existing plants into a production puzzle, rather than, looking at, what do they really need.
This is my sig.
Much like Microsoft, it isn't so much that one particular set of alternate vendors from a particular nation are better but that ALL OF THEM ARE.
.. having to ape Netbios... I still wonder why Novell won't bundle Netware with Linux and open source it.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. Linux is not better than Windows, it simply is an ok, and incomplete, alternative that is attractive because of its price and its ideology appeals to those with a leftist bent. But, from a technology perspective, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 remain on par with Linux for web development, lead, if you have Monad, even for scripting, exceeds it significantly for gaming (not from OpenGL versus DX, but for sound, joystick, etc). Linux has a better networking stack than Windows does..but I believe Vista fixed that, although some reports suggest that they broke sound to do it. Linux, gasp, has no native file sharing and network printing protocol
Visual Studio, when working in C#, remains the premier development environment on any platform. Office is better than OpenOffice... Access remains the best desktop database, and SQL Server is really only answered by Oracle, which is, incidentally, another American company.
Screw the Japanese, XBOX360 is better than PS3 and iPod is better than walkman. I'm with Bill Gates and Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Apple over Sony ALL THE WAY. You see, I used to work for RCA, and Sony kicked our Ass, and I gleefully hope for Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to plant the red white and blue back into consumer electronics.
Now, that's not to say that the USA is automatically the best in IT. It's not. Europeans are damned good programmers... I used to play French games on my Atari 800, and I still remember when I first played Beast on the Amiga, with its obviously intimate knowledge of hardware, thinking, oh christ, the Germans are coming. And so they have came. They are very good, and I would more worry about the Europeans blowing us away in the low level O/S type of stuff, than I would about Indians filling out forms.
This is my sig.
Besides, being non-exempt won't get you any more face time with your kid. It just means he'll have a nicer video game console and more games that you give him when you feel guilty about your absentee parenting.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
50 grand now is probably worth about 30 grand 20 years ago.
Not necessarily. The period from the 1980s through 2000 was called the "Commodities Depression", where, in real dollars, all the prices of all the commodities fell dramatically over time. Right now, obviously, things are a bit different, with rising world demand driving all the basics higher.
But, even today, real interest rates are actually lower.. back in 1980, specifically, inflation and interest rates were in double digits. Although, right now, there's some bad fundamentals... the USA seemed to think it could have a trade policy where it could buy everything the world makes, and well, it can't. So, we have a mountain of debt we have to deal with.
This is my sig.
Dear $manager-
Please accept my two-week notice of resignation dated $today. My last day at the firm will be $today+14.
I also want to thank you for the opportunity to work at $company, and I wish both you and the firm much success in the future.
Sincerely,
maz2331
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I do not get this at all. You had an interview, right? Did they not tell you the job expectations then? If they said, hey, you are gonna be on call, then guess what, its not a 40 hour work week. If they lie to you in the interview, look for another job. Lying is not a good quality in management anyway.
I have done quite a bit of job changing, and I have some koans of wisdom that have worked for me YMMV
Its all about finding the right spot (usually a small shop) where you can basically run the show IT-wise and dictate how things are done. As long as you do your job well, are smart, and everything works (mostly) you should be in a cush job playing around most of the time for great pay. If your job isn't like this, move on. Many jobs are. You are in IT. You make majik. Nobody knows how you do it. Sure it only took you a couple hours to get that vpn up. They don't need to know that (shhh.)
And lets face it, IT is a professional job. I have a masters degree, I make considerable money, I have considerable decision-making ability. I am a professional. I have no desire to try to get overtime for the 2 hours I came in on sunday to do updates and reboot stuff. I would much rather that I were looked at as a professional on a par with management.
If you are working at a job that treats you like a slave, move jobs. If there are no jobs, move geographically. There are craploads in the bay area right now. Come on down, everyone else is. If you can't command a decent salary go get more education. Really this whining to the government crap isnt going to help anyone. The government can't regulate anything correcly. Regulate your own life.
Is that, its important to note that Americans are actually manufacturing more than they ever have in their national history. It's just that, with the acceptance and refinement of more Japanese management methods, coupled with automation and customer driven product development, there's not as much of a need for workers.
The one thing that sucks, though, in the country, is the lack of work for low skilled workers getting decent jobs. Sure, it may be more efficient to send that work overseas to China, but, it also removes a leg in the ladder from poverty to the middle class and is ultimately what's helping to drive the growing gap between rich and poor and also shrink the middle class.
You see, Henry Ford got his start on a factory floor, and today's young Henry Ford, would have no job at all.
This is my sig.
I work for the Australian federal government as a Oracle DBA, on about Aus$60k pre-tax. 40 hour weeks and I get paid overtime for coming in to work out side business hours. Also get 4 weeks paid rec leave and 4 weeks sick leave per year.
I know that I could get probably double the pay if I was a contractor or in a private company, but i'd be trading a lot of benefits for that money. But my heart is not in IT, so while I am competent at what I do, I dont shine compared to others in my team, except when doing diagrams of infrastructure/computers systems. I'm trying to figure out how to transition to a career as an artist because I love creating pictures.
The funny/amusing thing is there are many IT jobs going in Australia both at the federal level and state level, plus I've heard that New Zealand HR firms look here to poach skill people to work there.
Whilst the conditions of employment are good where I work, there have been moves/changes being implemented by the current government to reduce employement conditions in trade-offs for increasing pay at similar rates to the national inflation. If we get a change of government with the next impending election things might swing back the other way.
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
Amen to that.
I own a business and I can testify to that condition. When I hit a revenue limitation, sometimes there simply is no way to jump to the next level without everybody sacrificing something. Although I forced my employees to work harder, I had also cut my own salary.. hard. Just to impress how large I cut my own compensation, my employees often nudged me to buy a better cellphone because at that time their cellphones were more expensive than mine. (At that time, I sold my old cellphone and bought used Ericsson T39M for around US$25).
But did all of my employees accept my reasonable demand to sacrifice by working harder? Nooo! There were some who declined to work harder and make many fusses about it. Of course once everything had settled down, I know to whom I give better compensations.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
I had previously worked as a WAN admin/Security for a international software company. All of the "upper" IT staff carried mobile phones (ie. expected to be on call 24/7). We all worked 50-60 hours/week minimum and often came in on the weekends. This was a few years ago when the job market was down. I got so frustrated coming in at 4am and not being compensated (not even lieu time). I decided that if someone was going to call me at 4am it should be for a damn good reason. Since making a horizontal move is difficult when the job market is down, I did what seemed to be the only sensible thing and decided to change careers completely. I am almost finished medical school now. My life is currently a financial mess and it has been a massive effort. However, when I think about how stagnant things would have been if I had stayed in my previous work environment I have no regrets. I read a few of the comments regarding this story. Many people mentioned that you have to stand up for yourself, change jobs etc when being used by your company. However if you have less than 3 years under your belt, quitting and finding another job in a fair company is difficult. Another individual implied that successful companies don't have dead weight executives. I would totally disagree. Where I used to work there were several people on the corporate welfare package. (Essentially sitting on their butts all day and getting a six figure salary). Working in such an environment is frustrating. There are a lot of decent companies that treat their employees fairly and in times of need even more will provide good conditions in order to recruit talent. However for every honest and fair employer how many poor ones are there out there? That is why there are people pushing for this law. Technology was supposed to make it easier for people to live. It was supposed to give us more free time. It is somewhat ironic that those of us who build and support this infrastructure are not living with that lifestyle at all. The culture of corporate America has changed other fields outside IT as well. Perhaps I have a different perspective since I think that time becomes a more important commodity as you get older.
brothels.... can you read me now?
look at the executives of the companies and see them getting paid BIG bucks - way more than they probably should.
Who's to say?
And see them stealing peoples money (Enron, Worldcom etc...) and bascially getting away with it.
Actually, they went to jail.
How many executives are doing it and NOT getting caught? Probably A lot more than you think!
Actually, probably not. They're rich, why risk it?
You have the RIAA/MPAA stealing from "artists" and US the people who actually buy their crap!
I don't believe offering contracts to 'nobody' artists who think they have a shot at making a name for themselves is 'stealing'. Both sides weigh their options. Most of the legendary bands started out not owning their own songs--they had to give them to the record companies in exchange for their investment.
The big rich executives get paid WAY too much steal from others and it's ok.
Oh so now 'a lot' has turned into basically 'all'... now 'they steal'. Alright then.
Again, who's to say they get paid too much? Executives have to have connections and friends in high places. Stockholders can't just 'buy' that unless it comes in the form of a person. They pay the CEO figure head to keep their company politically and socially connected, which is probably worth more than what they're paid.
Companies would rather outsource to some other country whos workers are willing to work for dimes on the dollar than to pay people decently.
Define 'decent' wages in the global sense. If you're not an idiot, you'll say "impossible"
To me let those ******* companies move their business overseas, take the jobs with them and then let the rest of the U.S. QUIT using their products and services.
You boycott every product with a foreign manufacturer. Try it.
If the cost of living in the U.S. wasn't so high I bet people wouldn't need such higher salaries. What is the cost of living in India? A LOT lower than it is here, hence they can get away with needing less pay.
Yeah, higher standard of living = higher cost of living. They also have maybe a tenth the per capita government we do and no labor laws and NO FREAKIN LAWYERS like in the TFA.
It sucks to live in India. That's why it costs nothing.
Corporations don't get this AT ALL. If they would help bring the cost of living DOWN in the U.S.
Ever heard of Wal*Mart?
how can we compete in a "GLobal Economy" if everywhere companies are sending jobs has far lower costs of living than we do.
By owning and managing the companies that do those jobs. Oh, and by inventing the products they're peddling/building.
But I think corporate EXECUTIVES need to get a pay cut! NO! they would rather "lay off" hundreds or thousands of employees just so they can keep their cushy job, getting paid millions of dollars and getting millions of dollars in stock options.
What percentage of a company's money actually goes to executives? Do you even know?
Companies with corrupt executives usually go down, or the stockholders boot them out. It's actually a hell of a lot more democratic than our government is.
If anything Engineers and scientist should be making more than MBA exeuctives!
Most engineers are a dime a dozen too... In India.
If you don't like it, get an MBA yourself. What's keeping you?
by stealing your time, the solution is to let him fuck you as hard as he wants?
Oh, that's what those "antiquated" and "outmoded" unions made progress on. If it wasn't for the labour movement, we'd still be working in sweatshops for scrip redeemable at the company store.
...is invariably gonna lead to a culture of workaholics.
Wait a minute..did the article say IT workers? Heck then it makes no diff coz they're already workaholics. Barring a few like me, though.
Missing the point... in order for that to happen peoples retirement funds which are tied up in stocks would have to stagnate which means the fund goes under, or they pull the money out and the company becomes worth nothing.
Mean while we have outrageous home loans because people feel they are entitled to make money off their house in a very short period of time, and if they don't will sell driving prices down and/or not vote for the politicians who want to keep their careers (note this, important, the career politician is a BAD thing as far as all this is concerned) and so people keep doing things to drive home prices up, again to make money.
Those executives get paid by stock holders more or less who are the cause of problem #1, and also #2. The fact people expect to not have to save and instead "invest" a smaller amount and that doing so entitles them to make wads of cash off it is silly. Companies are expected to be worth billions within a year instead of building up over decades as they used to. Everyone wants a Google with $550 stock price after five years.
Mean while these same people pay 1/4 their income in interest to the banks via credit cards, home loans, car loans etc because they couldn't wait another year to buy that big screen TV or buy the house with wood countertops instead of granite. Another large portion goes to pay off the governments debt (100% of your federal income tax in the US goes to pay interest in debt, not provide service).
A debt based economy is doomed to implode if people stop spending for even a week.
After Sept 11th what did the government ask people to do? Serve in the military? Volunteer in their community? No... keep spending. That should tell you something.
Sorry, but stop trying to force your ideas of what a work week should be on me. I've worked for some of the best paying companies in the bay area -- companies that provide incredible benefits. I can come in whenever I want and leave whenever I want. All anyone really cares about is that I get my work done on time. Making employees punch time clocks just results in all of us being stuck working 9-5, slaves to some magical goal that simply CAN'T exist in an industry like this. We have deadlines, not quotas. Yes, some weeks I put in 50 or 60 hours. Other weeks I put in less than 30. I'm not terribly concerned about the extra time I occasionally put in because I know I've got plenty of leeway when I need more time off later; aside from that, I actually enjoy what I do for a living. Everyone who thinks overtime is a good idea for this industry has no idea what they're really asking for. They think they'll just be earning more money, but in reality they'll be further reducing themselves to hourly factory slaves with no real ability to advance or do anything meaningful with their careers.
Oh, I did one better and simply incorporated a new company. I now have a patent app pending in an unrelated field, kept my historical clients (as I have stated in other posts: never ever under any circumstances even consider thinking about signing NDAs) and...
The former employer is a client. They need my skill set, and it works out well for both of us.
The beauty of at-will jobs is that one phone call and it was over. Final straw was the second time in 2 weeks I had to pull a 24-hour day, and then got complaints about timeliness. Kept it friendly, but still left. They are a client of mine now and things work out better for both of us.
Ahhh, "all well and good" -- the badge of the smug, self-satisfied conservative who can't even parse the phrase. It's nothing but a brain fart, designed to make the user sound like the hale fellow, well met (yes, I can parse that trite phrase) who thinks it makes him look as if he's considered all sides of the discussion.
Aahhh, yes, again. Worth -- in the view of the fat cats with the multi-million dollar salaries; stocks they were GIVEN, not PAID FOR, even if at some discount, like the poor saps on the front line; stock options beyond counting; golden parachutes that are irrevocable, unlike the pension funds they covet to piss away on yet more perks for themselves. "Locked up potential operating capital", my sore asshole.
Frankly, the ESOP is one of the biggest jokes ever pulled over on the American worker. If I do something wonderful that makes my company stock go up one dollar, my measly five hundred shares get me five hundred dollars. But the boys in the boardroom, with their fifty thousand (GIVEN to them) make fifty thousand dollars. Nice to be able to amplify the work of others that way.
Fuck them all, right in the heart.
Please educate yourself. The european (EU25) unemployment rate is at the moment at 7.9 %, with Denmark having 3.8% and the Netherlands with 3.9%. There are unions in those countries, you know? Do you also know that the US, with their primal anti-unions stance, had it's unemployment rate surpassing the 7.0% mark in the 80s and 90s?, even surpassing the 10% mark between 1982 and 1983?
That relation between the existence of unions and an increase in the unemployment rate is nothing more than scare mongering. It's bullshit. Are you scared of having any worker's rights just to be able to stick with this retarded anti-union stance?
I said work harder, not work longer. While still within the agreed working hours, it is my right to tighten the working hours. Less short break and less conversation while still within working hours.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
Let's get a grip on reality here. The original goons were people like the (armed) Pinkerton thugs and the (armed) corrupt cops who were hired by the corporations to intimidate the workers into knuckling under and quit demanding their human rights. Whatever has been done by the unions pales by comparison, because the actions of the corporate thugs were always covered by the locally purchased politicians.
You have several good options for health insurance which include, but are not limited to:
The biggest problem with getting health insurance on your own is that there are so many choices and so many variables that it is difficult to evaluate them all.
I haven't had a "job" in years, but I had zero difficulty finding health coverage that meets my family's needs. And that is with my wife having an expensive, chronic, and incurable health problem.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Ever heard of Wal*Mart?
Newsflash: saving 30% on a cheap plastic trinket made to last half as long does not represent an "increase" in standard of living.
I think the law firm should fight against wage slavery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Of programmers, Thierman says, "Yes, they get to pick whatever code they want to write, but they don't tell you what the program does ... All they do is implement someone else's desires.'"
Of surgeons, I say, "All they do is implement some else's desires." Overtime for surgeons!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
'You can always quit, you know' is a b.s. and cop out answer. No, most people can't just quit. Especially not if you have a family that depends on you. 'Sorry kids, we can not have lunch today, because dad couldn't stand work anymore.'
.. if you work someone 60 hours a week, IE. not changing their time in the office one bit, you are almost doubling the salary annually. If someone earns 70k a year for a 40 hour week, and you have to pay them time and 1/2 for 20 hours a week, you are paying them an additional 52k a year. so your paying 3/4 the cost of an additional employee, but only getting 1/2 the hours.
.. your back to 40 hours a week, with 3 extra folks in your dept to pick up the slack, and yeah .. you get to see your kids again. [Or your salary doubles overnight .. and things stay the same, but your kid's college education is payed off by the time they are 6.]
.. AFTER they leave .. you must have done something right :P
Actually, I'm going to have to correct you on this. Being non-exempt WOULD give you more face time with your kids. When your employer has to pay you overtime, IE: anything *OVER* 40 hours a week, they have to pay you your hourly rate + 50%. So
Effectively, you are nearly doubling your salary expenses for your business. If the majority of a day's overtime occur after 11:00pm, they are forced to pay 2X the employees hourly rate for *ALL* overtime that day. So, lets say you work 2 hours at the office, then get a 2:10 phone call that lasts for two hours and five mins. thats all at 2X rate.
They only thing an employer might save on is duplication on health insurance benefits. Otherwise, they are effectively paying a full employees salary to someone, and getting 1/2 the hours of of them. [20 hours overtime instead of 40 hours normal]
So, long story, as soon as accounting figures that out
The funny thing is, I never picked up on this when I was a slave to the keyboard. It wasn't until I moved to management that it all became apparent. Its basic, basic math. And thats before you factor in that people who don't work 20 hours overtime a week are generally better motivated, happier, and hate coming to work less. So they are on average, more productive.
In management, of course, i'm exempt again - but I get to hold my own hours, and my job is judged on my achievements, not by my hours. I try to keep my guys on a 40 hour schedule, so they don't burn out. If there is a crunch and they stay more, I try to let them off early when its NOT crunch and they are caught up. As an example of how well that works, just last week, I had a guy who left for a better paying job, send me a [gift], thanking me and the other management staff for not only teaching him a boat load of stuff, but for being good folks to work for. [He learned more here in a year straight out of college, than most of the kids he graduated with will learn over the next three years.]
When your x-employees send you gifts
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
'You can always quit, you know' is a b.s. and cop out answer.
You know what? You're wrong. Not only is that answer not a cop out, it is an essential part of a free-market society. You need to provide feedback to the system; if you don't, then you are screwing up the labor market.
most people can't just quit. Especially not if you have a family that depends on you.
A situation such as this is the result of poor financial planning. I think that this is the biggest failing of US secondary education--that no personal finance courses are required or even available. If you don't have 6 months' living expenses in a liquid account somewhere, what is your plan for an involuntary job separation?
This isn't the 60s anymore. The days of lifetime employment at a single firm were over decades ago. You must plan for this! It is not optional.
Actually, I'm going to have to correct you on this. Being non-exempt WOULD give you more face time with your kids.
Wake me when you own your own business. Until then, don't try to "correct" me on how employers behave.
I'm going to tell you why you're wrong from two different angles. Finance and economics. Depending on your background, at least one ought to resonate.
First, the financial:
They only thing an employer might save on is duplication on health insurance benefits.
First, substitute "might" with "will". Secondly, realize that the savings you are so quick to trivialize amounts to over $10,000.00 per year.
But that isn't even the half of it. Off the top of my head, here are the expenses companies incur with hiring a new white-collar employee:
Weigh all of those expenses against "just asking one of your current employees to 'get it done', even if it means a little overtime," starts to sound awfully appealing, no?
This does not yet even factor in the "Mythical Man Month" effect. Just because one person can complete a job in X hours doesn't mean that two people can complete the same job in X/2 hours. The classic illustration: Can 9 women make a baby in 1 month? Of course not. Can 30 developers do the work of 15 in half the time? Well, what has your experience taught you? Mine has taught me, "nofsckin'way".
So, long story, as soon as accounting figures that out .. your[sic] back to 40 hours a week, with 3 extra folks in your dept to pick up the slack
Well, I think we've already debunked that math, but let's debunk it even further.
Employers are not stupid. Let's say I was to convert my employees from exempt to non-exempt hourly (this is a little bit of an academic exercise, since all of my employees already are non-exempt hourly, but let's stick with it). Am I going to take an employee who earns $50k/yr, divide by 2000 hours (typical work year), and set his hourly wages at $25/hr? Even if I know that that employee works a fair amount of overtime? Hah hah. No. Nice try.
Instead, what I'm goi
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
A situation such as this is the result of poor financial planning. I think that this is the biggest failing of US secondary education--that no personal finance courses are required or even available. If you don't have 6 months' living expenses in a liquid account somewhere, what is your plan for an involuntary job separation?
.. So .. let me 'wake you' now. My first business I started at 20 years of age, and sold it .. at a significant profit after two years. I actually financed the sale to the buyers myself, for additional profit. I am in the process of selling the second business now (just waiting on the lawyers), its currently valuation is at roughly $3000000 - and the purchasing company has already obtained VC funding for growth based on the development of the company.
.. ignoring computers, have you ever hung drywall for 14 hours straight ? Hows that last sheet look compared to the first one ? just as perfect ? I doubt it. People
Wake me when you own your own business. Until then, don't try to "correct" me on how employers behave.
I certainly have more than 6 months cash on hand, I think you are confusing the issue. I am not saying *I* need to do this, I am saying most employees do not live this way. I can identify, because I have a child. Kids are expensive. Something I don't see you mention. You see, what you fail to notice is that a two year old doesn't *WANT* a new video game console, they want mom or dad to hug them. What your also forgetting is that the highest factor of work related stress is actually stress from the home - significantly - not being there enough.
What I will go so far to say is that employers, like myself, and yourself - know that most people live like this, and take advantage of it. Employers LOVE the idiots that live from paycheck to paycheck, because they can never quit. What you also forget, is that if a person never earns a high enough income, they will live like this for decades. Not everyone HAS the option of having six months cash on hand. I know people making over $130k-$150k a year who certainly do not. [of course, law school and medical school are quite expensive.] So yes, i give you the point that people should live like this. Although, I will counter that point with the idea that if you actually keep six months of living expenses liquid, then your dumb with your money - better to have it in short term investments that you can borrow against, than to have it sit there NOT working for you. Cash in hand is a suckers game with the interest rates over the last four years.
Now, for some reason, you seem to want to direct these questions at me personally, so let me respond.
I am moving on to my *THIRD* business
What your missing in your 'plumbing' example above is economy of scale. Yeah, when you have three guys working for you, its a lot easier to ask one to work a little more. What you are also forgetting is things like office furniture, computers etc. are considered assets of the company, and depreciate annually. Asset depreciation can be directly deducted from the bottom line. Additionally, assets don't get sick - or get fired (although they sometimes break I suppose - but then they become a write off.) Also, it sounds like your talking about two to three extra hours a week, not the average 10-20 that your typical IT worker does. No one is going to complain about a little extra money a few hours a week, but have them do that extra 80 hours a month, for free, for six or nine months and see how they feel about it.
So what's the point? The point is, when an hourly employee works hour #1, he's making his employer money. When he works hour #40, he's still making his employer money. Assuming that the employer is behaving rationally, the same will hold true for hour #50, and hour #60.
This leads into a continuation of my last sentence. And your reasoning is flawed. Have you ever sat in front of a computer and programmed for 14 hours straight ? Or
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
I can identify, because I have a child. Kids are expensive. Something I don't see you mention.
Don't tell me about expensive kids you have more than one kid, and in private school. College is cheap.
You see, what you fail to notice is that a two year old doesn't *WANT* a new video game console
No, you just didn't get my drift. Of course a two year old (and older children, though they won't dare admit it) want to be with you more than they want a new video game. That was exactly my original point: for workers who are now salaried, they are not going to be working any less if they go hourly. They'll just potentially earn more money, which they will spend on their kids out of guilt for absentee parenting.
What I will go so far to say is that employers, like myself, and yourself - know that most people live like this, and take advantage of it.
I think that you are attributing an awful lot of malice to me, and to employees in general. When I set my compensation, I do so based on the labor market. I do not think, "Heh. Joe. I can treat him like dirt because I know he doesn't have 6 months' expenses in the bank." Employers do whatever the labor market tells us to do.
Not everyone HAS the option of having six months cash on hand. I know people making over $130k-$150k a year who certainly do not.
Not everyone has the "option"? It's not an option, it's a requirement. It's just something you do--like wiping your ass. I suppose wiping your ass is technically optional (no one is holding a gun to your head), but just like having 6 months' expenses saved up, it's something you really have to do.
And what about people making $150k/yr? Why do you say that those people "certainly do not"? I said 6 months' expenses, not income. I don't have 6 months of my income in a liquid account, either. That would be stupid, since I make more than I spend. But you can be damn sure that I have 6 months of expenses in an FDIC-insured account, just waiting for an emergency to happen.
Although, I will counter that point with the idea that if you actually keep six months of living expenses liquid, then your dumb with your money - better to have it in short term investments that you can borrow against
And what would these short-term investments be? How safe are they? What is their rate of return?
My liquid savings is an an FDIC-insured money market account earning a 5.2% APY (Capital One/Costco MMA). Use that as a point of reference. For you, what happens if the economy takes a nosedive, your employer has to lay you off because of the economy, but the value of your "short-term investments" takes a nosedive as well due to said economic downturn? What are you going to borrow against now? How will you make your payments on this new debt?
Now, for some reason, you seem to want to direct these questions at me personally, so let me respond.
I was using "you" more in the general sense, but whatever.
What you are also forgetting is things like office furniture, computers etc. are considered assets of the company, and depreciate annually.
Who cares? Those were 3 of the 20-some-odd additional expenses that I named that you conveniently ignore. Plus, what comfort is a depreciation to me when I have to spend from my current cashflow just to depreciate an asset?
I don't know what business you're in, but in my businesses, we go to great pains NOT to depreciate assets. We rent. We take advantage of deductions for trucks and computer equipment.
And anyway, that depreciation/deduction point is totally moot. Why? You're weighing depreciating assets against employee compensation, which is, of course, a deduction. So your expense on depreciable assets vs. overtime wages, from a tax perspective, actually advantageous to paying the additional wages, since you don't have to depreciate wages over years.
But more impor
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock