Should IT Professionals Be Exempt From Overtime Regulations?

Paul Fernhout writes: Nick Hanauer is a billionaire who made his fortune as one of the original investors in Amazon. He suggests President Obama should restore U.S. overtime regulations to how they worked in the 1970s to boost the economy. Quoted by PBS NewsHour: "In 1975, more than 65 percent of salaried American workers earned time-and-a-half pay for every hour worked over 40 hours a week. Not because capitalists back then were more generous, but because it was the law. It still is the law, except that the value of the threshold for overtime pay — the salary level at which employers are required to pay overtime — has been allowed to erode to less than the poverty line for a family of four today. Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime.

Many millions of Americans are currently exempt from the overtime rules — teachers, federal employees, doctors, computer professionals, etc. — and corporate leaders are lobbying hard to expand "computer professional" to mean just about anybody who uses a computer. Which is almost everybody. But were the Labor Department instead to narrow these exemptions, millions more Americans would receive the overtime pay they deserve. ... The twisted irony is, when you work more hours for less pay, you hurt not only yourself, you hurt the real economy by depressing wages, increasing unemployment and reducing demand and innovation. Ironically, when you earn less, and unemployment is high, it even hurts capitalists like me." If overtime pay is generally good for the economy, should most IT professionals really be exempt from overtime regulations?

Comments

No

[tompaulco]

As a manager and an employee, I vote No for overtime regulation exemptions. If a business is dependent upon their employees working for free after 40 hours, then their business model is flawed and it is better for everyone if they go under.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The cheapskate employees will be forced to hire an additional worker instead of forcing existing workers into 80 hour work weeks. Win-win for employees, the unemployed, and the economy.

Re:No

[x0ra]

So the whole tech industry business model is flawed ? Anybody in the SV sticking to 40h/week is pretty likely to get laid off, if not fired, pretty quick.

Re:No

[smkndrkn]

That's nice and all except that without some sort of law or regulation, stating that a company cannot work you over 40 hours without additional compensation, is pointless. Every single company I've worked for has been happy to have me working 60+ hours a week and I doubt I'm in the minority.

Re:No

[smkndrkn]

So the whole tech industry business model is flawed ? Anybody in the SV sticking to 40h/week is pretty likely to get laid off, if not fired, pretty quick.

+1 if I had it.

Re:No

[tchuladdiass]

It actually depends. Back a while ago, a large consulting / outsourcing firm had faced a lawsuit, that a bunch of their IT employees were mis-classified. The outcome of that suit is that they were all reclassified as hourly, eligible for overtime -- but their pay got slashed by about 30%.

For myself, I like not having to punch a clock or fill in a time sheet. And if I have to run out an hour early, I like that my pay won't be docked by that amount. (Note, that employers can deduct hours from your vacation pool for less than either 8 hours a day worked, or 40 hours a week, can't remember which, but they can't dock your pay if you are exempt).

Re:No

[gothzilla]

Isn't it though? Business took advantage of the one thing we geeks are known for, and that is that many of us have an incredible desire to constantly mess with technology. Instead of messing with what your boss wants for 40 hours a week then going home and messing with what you want for another 40, your boss gets all your time and you get none.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

yes....
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-hours

Re:No

[Mike Buddha]

I used to work for a bank that would entice the lowly field techs with offers of exempt positions and once they had them, they'd work them to the bone. It was purely a scam to get more work out of already productive employees.

Re:No

[x0ra]

Of course, a company will never complain if you work for a lower wage...

Re:No

[Luckyo]

It's called "race to the bottom". If the rules were legislated, everyone would have to stick to it.

As noted, many things since golden age of 70s have been systematically eroded to their current level.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You should find a new job ... cause you're getting screwed if you're thinking like that.

Re:No

[Hussman32]

For programmers in CA, normally they are non-exempt, although I'm sure many skirt around it. My understanding is if you want a favorable equity package, you'll accept exempt status. If you want an hourly wage and a life, you declare non-exempt. .

Personally, I think if you're not a manager and you aren't getting a good chunk of stock, you should be getting overtime.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

And the worst part? You or a co-worker get outsourced, because they used the unpaid OT pay to hire the overseas coder

Re:No

[Livius]

So the whole tech industry business model is flawed ?

Yes.

Re:No

[pixelpusher220]

but their pay got slashed by about 30%.

A somewhat predictable result. However, it would be a teachable moment in how much overtime they are expecting from you.

Re:No

[The MAZZTer]

If they need more manhours worked, and they can't get more hours, they need to hire more man. Men. Employees of any gender. You know what I meant.

Re:No

[jellomizer]

For the most part it is.

The biggest myth. If you work harder then you get more.
As a salary employee if you work harder then you get paid the same. If you need some extra money for that week you just kinda have to wait longer. If you have the energy to work over 40 hours a week then you should get paid more for the over time.

By allowing IT people to have some control in their salary, it give more power to them and allow them to feel more accomplished. And they will be more willing to work those hours without as much stress.

Re:No

[__aaclcg7560]

Anybody in the SV sticking to 40h/week is pretty likely to get laid off, if not fired, pretty quick.

As a skilled I.T. technician, my contract prohibits me from working overtime. I haven't worked overtime in 10+ years. Being a contractor, I've gotten laid off plenty of times. However, I make 80% more than those who stayed at the same company for years and accept 2% pay raises as normal.

Re:No

[KeithJM]

SV? Is that El Salvador?

Re:No

[jeffmflanagan]

>So the whole tech industry business model is flawed ? Anybody in the SV sticking to 40h/week is pretty likely to get laid off, if not fired, pretty quick.

If that's not flawed, it's exploitative at the very least. It's not something to be emulated in a race to the bottom.

Re:No

[Moof123]

I think the point is that currently the 50-60 hour work week is baked into a high salary. I think a lot of companies and employees would be better with a lower base salary but with overtime pay on top of that instead of fixed high salary. During lean times overtime could get cut back, making salary costs more flexible, and likely reducing layoffs as a result. Employees would likely work 8 hour days more often, and be more likely to have their productivity needs met rather than being expected to just burn more hours.

The current setup has a perverse incentive to work employees extra hours rather than hire the correct headcount. Anything over 40 hours of work is "free" for the company.

Companies that compete by expecting 60 hours of work from all employees necessarily create an unhealthy work environment, and defacto discriminate against workers with families.

Re:No

[jeffmflanagan]

>Instead of messing with what your boss wants for 40 hours a week then going home and messing with what you want for another 40,

This is how it works for me, but then my employer isn't looking to exploit and burn-out their workers, and benefits from the things I learn in my self-directed time. there are still 35 and 40 hr a week jobs that pay very well.

Re:No

[tompaulco]

Back a while ago, a large consulting / outsourcing firm had faced a lawsuit, that a bunch of their IT employees were mis-classified. The outcome of that suit is that they were all reclassified as hourly, eligible for overtime -- but their pay got slashed by about 30%.

If my pay were slashed by 30% but I got paid even 1-for-1 overtime, I would still come out ahead. If I got time and a half, my pay would be double even with a 30% cut in wage.

Re:No

[tompaulco]

employers and employees both want to work overtime for normal pay.

The employees have no choice of working the overtime. They don't WANT to do it. They just do it because all of the industry has colluded into not paying for overtime and there is no choice.

Re:No

[Jane Q. Public]

Some years ago, I was very upset to learn that my position was exempt from overtime. I mean... I wasn't an executive, I was just a lowly coder. The exemption laws were supposed to apply to people who had some say in how a company is run, and pretty much presumes that you are an executive-level employee who sets his/her own hours.

Re:No

[tompaulco]

I used to have to travel at a previous company and the banks that I was sent to paid for my time by the day. So if they were paying $2,000 a day they were going to get 24 hours out of me to make it worth their while. However, my company did not pay me for the overtime.
At another company, I was sent out to clients who were billed hourly. If I worked 16 hours, the client was billed for 16 hours, and I was paid for 8 hours.

Re:No

[AFCArchvile]

As a newly unemployed individual contributor, I vote yes, because we're at the point where most businesses are too entrenched (or incompetent) to correct their business model. Well over 75% of the job listings I review have phrases like "Availability to occasionally work some evenings and weekends", which could mean anything from once a quarter to every single week, depending on staffing (or lack, thereof). Also, in multiple phone screens and interviews, I have heard the expectation of departmental employees working over 40 hours a week, even for locations with long train commutes. Just because I'm single doesn't mean I want to stay that way forever; I need to eat right, exercise, have a decent amount of life in my mythical "work-life balance", and so on.

We are past the point of companies regulating themselves in this matter; we need a law to enforce it. There are going to be many companies whining about lost revenue, but most of that revenue will come back to them in consumer spending, and frankly, it's the fault of the United States government for leaving these regulations so stagnant for so long.

Re:No

[Frobnicator]

For programmers in CA, normally they are non-exempt, although I'm sure many skirt around it. My understanding is if you want a favorable equity package, you'll accept exempt status. If you want an hourly wage and a life, you declare non-exempt.

Both the Department of Labor and the courts disagree with your assessment.

The actual job duties themselves, not the job title, not the method of payment (hourly vs salary), and not the contract, determine if an individual worker is exempt from overtime rules.

This has been challenged time and time again in the courts. The concept of a "working foreman" is often mentioned since management is exempt from overtime. If the individual can show that at least half the time is spent on non-management tasks they are not exempt. If you spend 49% of your time or less doing management tasks you are not exempt. Even if your job title is "Managing Director", even if your contract calls you an exempt worker.

Other companies frequently fight it claiming that since they pay on an annual salary basis rather than an hourly basis they don't track it and therefore don't have to pay. These arguments lose.

Many companies like to skirt around the law since it saves money. Many companies (wrongly) claim that workers on an annual salary are exempt from overtime. Many companies (wrongly) specify that a position is exempt from overtime when legally it should not be. Even if you are paid on a regular salary instead of hourly the company is still obligated by FLSA overtime regulations.

If in doubt, make a phone call to the department of labor or whatever your state's equivalent is. They can ask a few questions and determine your status. Businesses violating the law are generally forced to pay back wages to the individuals and back taxes to the government. Since government really hates to miss tax money they tend to enforce this whenever discovered.

Re:No

[gordo3000]

no, because a significant chunk of IT professionals in the valley do not make less than the 69k minimum he is talking about. And for many near that cusp, it would make sense to give them the raise to 70k and not pay overtime.

This article is about the IT professionals making 40k (and they do exist given what is laughably categorized as IT professional) who regularly turn out 60 hour weeks.

Re:No

[Rinikusu]

I'd say so. And you guys wonder why other people want a union. It has nothing to do with quality of work, but quality of life after work.

Re:No

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Note, that employers can deduct hours from your vacation pool for less than either 8 hours a day worked, or 40 hours a week, can't remember which, but they can't dock your pay if you are exempt

Many of the people I know who work for other companies are exempt from overtime pay, but do get docked pay for less than 40 hours per week (or 80 hours per 2 weeks). Vacation time is only used for pre-arranged (and approved) time off. Sick hours are only used when they call in sick - before their normal start time.

For me, the time short goes against my "sick hours" before it goes against my vacation hours.

Re:No

[khellendros1984]

I'm in southern California, and I have a similar experience. I work 40 hours, and it's enough to finish everything that's required of me. In the 6 years I've been employed here, there've been maybe a dozen times that I've had to go over a 45 hour week. When I hear some of the work stories that people talk about, all I can do is thank my lucky stars that I don't live somewhere like SV, because I wouldn't have lasted long with those kinds of workdays.

Re:No

[Xinef Jyinaer]

Amazing just amazing. I work as a programmer in a Small town (55,000 people) in Canada. This is my second year out of college I am making 70k+ a year. Which is enough to pay for my family (we bought a house my first year on the job after college) and my wife can stay home with our now 2yr old son because we are living comfortably enough. I work a 37.5 hour week. I have to agree with tompaulco on this one.

Re:No

[LessThanObvious]

True, maybe there should be no overtime exemption for anyone making less than say $85,000. It's hard for me to see how a business can justify really owning your time for $23,660. It's easier to swallow the idea that someone who is highly compensated would be expected to be fully invested in their job.

Re:No

[Mashiki]

What you got was lucky. I know programers here in Ontario that have been laid off from their jobs, then replaced by TFW's. Many have since moved to the patch to work.

Re:No

[dbIII]

Spot on.
If you don't get to set your own hours then your time shouldn't be free when a project gets out of control and needs more effort.
The other way around rewards poor management skills.

Re:No

[MSG]

As a newly unemployed individual contributor, I vote yes

I just want to point out the the post you replied to was voicing a "no" vote for overtime exemptions, which is the same position that you are advocating.

Re:No

[Bright Apollo]

Yeah, actually, it is flawed... for everyone but the top 1% that benefits from a collusive environment that expects more than 40 hours because "you're a professional".

It's bullshit and you know it.

--#

Re:No

[spire3661]

And we are telling you guys its time to knock that shit off. Very few people need to be working more than 40 hours per week. You dont have time to be a good citizen and family member if you work more than that.

Re:No

[Hussman32]

Agreed, I was talking specifically about programmers, although the previous post did say the tech industry so I should have been more clear on that.

All people accepting corporate positions will know if they are exempt or non-exempt, and as you said that classification is determined by their job duties. If a corporation does force overtime without pay they are opening themselves up to risk they normally wouldn't accept.

Now for start-ups, they play faster and looser, and usually get people to work overtime whether they are exempt or not.

Re:No

[sexconker]

So the whole tech industry business model is flawed ?

Yes.

Anybody in the SV sticking to 40h/week is pretty likely to get laid off, if not fired, pretty quick.

Flawed.

Re:No

[man_ls]

Yes. The tech industry's entire business model is flawed, because the massive profits being delivered are dependent on uncompensated overtime, illegal collusion and wage fixing, and H-1B abuse.

Re:No

[dbIII]

That's an annoying tactic. I worked on a plant shutdown where my manager exploited the situation where so much had been outsourced that there were not enough people to keep track of contractors. We'd sit waiting around drinking cups of tea from 7am to 5pm when the safety inspectors went home and then do some real work (frequently being told to go slow) until 2am, coming back at 7am for a bit over a month (was supposed to be a nine day shutdown). He was charging the client for overtime rates and paying a fairly low flat rate to his staff. Incredibly frustrating since most of us wanted to get the work done and get out of there and had some real work we could have been doing. It's a bit of a worry sitting high on scaffolding with a machine that involves electricity plus picric acid on your lap and going into microsleeps, especially when the things you are checking for damage will let out vast amounts of ammonia or hydrogen when they fail so it's not just your own safety at risk.
Of course that guy eventually had to bring people in from other cities once he's turned over a lot of employees and word had got around. I thought it weird that one of the first things he did after he employed me was to pull a knife out of his boot and show it to me, saying it was for protection, an odd thing for an engineer to do - made sense after a bit.
A lot of "red tape" exists due to thieves like that.

Re:No

[dskoll]

Yes, that whole model is flawed. SV may be making lots of money, but it's ruining people's lives if it expects insane work hours.

I work in the tech field (actually, I own a 10-person tech company) in Canada and I have never made my employees work overtime. Ever.

Unfortunately, given free reign, businesses will exploit employees and the labour laws in the US offer hardly any protection to workers.

Re:No

[MikeBabcock]

These overtime rule exemptions exist here in Ontario, Canada too ... and they're quite irritating.

Re:No

[LifesABeach]

I think Nick Hanauer should hire a taste tester.

Re:No

[khallow]

Yes, they do have this choice. Just get a different job that has fewer hours and pays less.

And the fact that they go along with this indicates that while employees maybe don't WANT to work overtime, they do want money.

Forcing the entire US to support your broken life style model is no different than forcing the US to support your broken business model.

Re:No

[Artifakt]

Add to that, companies that assume they will be able to get 60 hours a week in the future are assuming that the economy will still have all the problems it has right now, or more, in that future. That assumpion hardly sounds like a good business plan - "Our employment model is to assume the recession will never end.".

Re:No

[khallow]

If a business is dependent upon their employees working for free after 40 hours, then their business model is flawed and it is better for everyone if they go under.

Or more accurately, poor labor laws like this encourage companies to tap other supplies of labor, such as China or automation. Welcome to the reality of unintended consequences.

Re:No

[cheesybagel]

It reduced unemployment when it was implemented. Who is it to say unemployment wouldn't be even higher if they had an enlarged working period?

Re:No

[puzzled_decoy]

I think this is the most sane comment I've read so far. If a company said to me, "Well, if you accept this position you will end up working weekends, and probably 12 hour days, but we will pay you $150,000 annually" I would accept that in a heartbeat, and I would be pretty pissed if some regulation prevented me from accepting it/them offering it. On the other hand, people who are being paid $25,000 have no obligation to be pressured into working more than 40 hours a week.

Re:No

[cheesybagel]

Like Stalin used to say cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people. That's why.

Re:No

[An Ominous Coward]

Just prior to the 2008 economic collapse, France's employment for those aged 25 - 54 was around 83%, compared to 80% in the US. Lately, after the collapse and some recovery, the rate in France is 81%, compared to 76% in the US.

France has good educational opportunities, skewing comparisons for those under 25, and good retirement benefits, skewing comparisons for those over 54. But apples-to-apples for the core years of productivity show France has the right idea.

Re:No

[w3woody]

I completely agree, thank you. Too often I've seen managers imply strongly that overtime is required, and on almost every project I've worked on, the overtime was only required because the projects were so poorly mismanaged in the first place.

What's sad is that so many IT projects are mismanaged that most people assume it's the norm.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait it has been tested. In Germany. Where I got overtime pay as a software developer so that when I had to do a production deploy on a sunday I could go home early for the next week or get a half day off or choose to get it paid out. Last time I checked the German economy was going strong despite (because?) of this. Obviously an American doesnt "understand" these things at all as these are foreign concepts. Its much easier to accept that youre doing 80hour weeks yourself if you dont have to accept that 40 hour weeks are possible but you just dont get them.

Re:No

[mrchaotica]

LOL, silicon valley is for chumps. In Atlanta, I work 40 hours a week as a programmer then get to go home to my 3-bedroom house that'll be paid off before you losers even manage to save up for a down payment.

Re:No

[spitzak]

Huh? I have never encountered a programmer who was not an exempt employee.

Re:No

[spitzak]

Do you get overtime pay?

I would not be surprised if you get that too. You may be right about us being chumps.

Re:No

[spitzak]

This hit the special effects industry about 20 years ago. Artists were ruled as not being exempt employees. The companines (at least the ones I knew about) reclassified them as hourly but based their new salary on dividing the old weekly one by 55 hours, not 40.

Re:No

[An Ominous Coward]

I am getting my data from the Federal Reserve's domestic and foreign data: http://research.stlouisfed.org...

Tons of data you can view there. Pull up France's 25 - 54 employment, and the US's. My statement is true.

You, and Business Insider, are pushing a narrative that relies on apples-to-oranges. You and BI are relying on unemployment data covering all 18+ year olds. But that's a ridiculous metric for a country with strong educational social programs for the younger generation and strong retirement social programs for the older generation. The young take the time to learn more skills, the old are able to retire at a much younger age than the wage slaves in the US.

But of course the free market fundamentalists are going to seize on faulty reasoning if it can be used as an argument to dismantle social programs and worker protections.

Re:No

[jriding]

The rule that works.
All employees making 60% or more of what the CEO makes including salary, stock options, bonus, PTO, and any other perks can be included in being exempt from over time.
All others below the 60% mark get overtime.

Re:No

[Theaetetus]

For programmers in CA, normally they are non-exempt, although I'm sure many skirt around it. My understanding is if you want a favorable equity package, you'll accept exempt status. If you want an hourly wage and a life, you declare non-exempt.

Both the Department of Labor and the courts disagree with your assessment.

The actual job duties themselves, not the job title, not the method of payment (hourly vs salary), and not the contract, determine if an individual worker is exempt from overtime rules.

This has been challenged time and time again in the courts. The concept of a "working foreman" is often mentioned since management is exempt from overtime. If the individual can show that at least half the time is spent on non-management tasks they are not exempt. If you spend 49% of your time or less doing management tasks you are not exempt. Even if your job title is "Managing Director", even if your contract calls you an exempt worker.

Although you are correct about the fact that the job duties matter, rather than the simple title, and you are correct about the fact that companies will give you a title, declare that you're salaried and therefore exempt, and try all sorts of other tricks to avoid paying overtime, you're wrong about one crucial thing - there's also an exemption for programmers:

Computer workers may be exempt under any of the "white collar exemptions," as bona fide executive or administrative employees. (See, FLSA Coverage.) For example, a "network administrator" may be performing administratively exempt job duties. There are, in addition, some special rules which apply to employees who work with computers and permit them to be classified as exempt even if they don't meet the usual requirements for exempt executives or administrators. However, there are special provisions which exempt some computer employees who might not otherwise qualify as "professionally" exempt. These include systems analysts, programmers (who "write code"), or software engineers. More specifically, the special computer employee exemption applies to workers who apply systems analysis techniques and procedures to determine hardware, software, or system functional specifications, or who design, develop, test or modify computer systems or programs based on user or design specifications.

And that's what the article and thread are discussing - programmers. Here is the fact sheet from the DOL. If you:

• are compensated either on a salary or fee basis at a rate not less than $455 per week or, if compensated on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour; and
• are employed as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field,

then you probably are exempt from overtime.

Re:No

[smoot123]

Salary has not inflated with work hours so they really would be willing to pay you that same $150,000 without the extra work if they had to pay the overtime and do staffing properly since reduced unemployment drives wages up.

Then by all means, ask for it. Better yet, start your own software firm offering that deal and poach all the good programmers. If the money is just sitting on the table, why aren't you out grabbing it?

The answer is, of course, that salaries are generally at equilibrium. Employees negotiate for as much as they can (I certainly do each time I change jobs), employers push back equally hard. Everyone arrives at the best deal they can. It's extremely unlikely there's a ton of extra salary just sitting there because IT pros forgot to ask for it or were all such pushovers they didn't get it.

Re:No

[Lord Kano]

I suppose that it depends on the employer. I'm salary so I get no overtime but if I work over 40 hours in a week, I can take time off during the next week.

I like that arrangement. I make a good salary so I don't care about earning slightly more money and having it taxed at a higher rate. I'd rather reclaim some time during the next work week.

If the need arose, occasionally, I'd be willing to put in an 80 hour week in exchange for having the next week off.

LK

Re:No

[phorm]

Honestly though, I can't think of a job where I haven't been "Available to occasionally work some evenings and weekends" and done so. The caveat is that I was generally paid accordingly for my contributions (either OT or banked at an accelerated rate).

In many IT positions, sometimes shit hits the fan and you need to stick around (or come back in). As long as it's not a constant thing it's not a huge deal.

Re:No

[An Ominous Coward]

No, that is how (one metric for) UNemployment is measured. The FRED data I referenced is the comprehensive employment (_not_ UNemployment) of all persons aged 25 - 54 in France and in the US. No issues about measuring who's looking for a job and who isn't. You should actually look at the data source I posted instead of making these inaccurate statements.

Re:No

[mark-t]

Sure... and it's possible that any particular person might win a lottery someday. That doesn't mean it's likely to happen or something that is to be expected;.

Re:No

[coolsnowmen]

See "Computer Employee Exemption" http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtim...

Re:No

[Feyshtey]

Except that France is insolvent, and is proposing (or implemented?) tax rates as high as 75%. No small part of those problems are rooted in the entitlements promised to labor groups and retirees which they now know they cannot actually pay for.

I don't support an overtime exemption for anyone, but I cant fathom how anyone would recommend France as a beacon of accomplishment in labor or finance.

Re:No

[sir-gold]

So, they pay for 2 employees instead of 1, their COG goes up...

What is COG?

And no one is forced into 80 hour work weeks. Slavery was abolished over a century ago. If you don't want to work 80 hours, quit.......

Quitting is usually not an option, because there are bills to pay. It's called "wage slavery". Sure, you are "allowed" to quit a job whenever you want, but it could mean losing your home and all your worldly possessions.
Being homeless and starving might be preferable to being bull-whipped by your owner, but it's still not happy times.

Re:No

[pscottdv]

I remember the 70s. I have no idea how anyone could think it was a "golden age". We had high inflation, high unemployment, terrible service and low quality products and were only just starting to recover from all the many ways we had been poisoning our environment with lead, pesticides and sulfur.

Re:No

[NormalVisual]

Another thing that employers sometimes like to pull with salaried employees is not paying a full week's salary when there's a day or two when the office is closed during the week (holidays, etc.). If work was available at all during the week and you were willing and able to work, regardless of the number of days the office was closed, you're supposed to get your full week's pay unless it was the first or last week of your employment. If an employer has a policy that formally disregards that rule, or doesn't have a policy but regularly violates the rule, they risk losing the exempt status for their employees at that location.

Re:No

[Travoltus]

Wait, companies don't pay wages, actually the consumer does. Lower wages means the company's more competitive. In fact if no one were paid wages, the cost of doing business would plummet and America could out compete the world!

^^^ Sarcasm, folks.

Re:No

[Travoltus]

The term you're looking for is not slavery, but the Gilded Age.

Re:No

[Travoltus]

Those who do the basic workload for standard pay will be replaced by those who give everything they can for peanuts.

Those who give everything they can for peanuts will then be replaced by those who give everything they can for nothing, or next to nothing.

Then those will be replaced by automation.

Then what?

Has anyone here read this? http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

Re:No

[An Ominous Coward]

France isn't insolvent, that's ridiculous. Their borrowing costs are barely above Germany's. Get your economic facts from actual factual sources like the Federal Reserve, not from nutso right-wing opinion mongers.

Re:No

[BonThomme]

and no doubt they can paradoxically point to that paragraph, and say, "See? There's such a shortage of these guys we had to exempt them from overtime, or they'd bankrupt the economy!"

Re:No

[BonThomme]

FU money works in lieu of stones. It's really a wonderful thing.

Re:No

[LifesABeach]

Working longer hours for no pay may suck, but it benefits the economy by increasing productivity in a dollars per unit work completed.

Then why not still have salvery? Your 8 year's view of the world is mathmatically foundationless. You don't understand? Lets go work your mommy and daddy 80 hours a week till they die in front of you; it won't take long. You would be amazed at the new levels of understanding you will aquire.

Greed fears your looking past the 8:00am daily status meeting.

Re:No

[LifesABeach]

Yes it is flawed. It only considers the next mornings daily 8:00am status meeting. It's a "Boom Town" business model. And only a few seem to make a lot of money. And the rest are fired any way. Do you really think there's a Tech shortage? Junior, there's a shortage based on Cost. This business model uses Cost as a god.

Re:No

[anarcobra]

Yes, it is to be expected that you be able to pay people for the work they do.
If you can't finish your project without overtime that is a management failure.
You either pay for the extra work, or you hire more people.

Re:No

[Bengie]

Don't worry, those outsourced overseas programmers are so bad they can create negative value. It's more like guaranteed work for you to clean up after them.

Re:No

[mark-t]

Hiring more people doesn't necessarily get the job done any faster. Especially in something like video game development.

The point of paying what is generally a respectable salary in the first place is to compensate the employee for the extra hours they will have to put in during crunch time, where the employee will not generally receive any additional income as a result of their additional efforts beyond a basic 40 hour work week. Ideally this wouldn't happen at all, but we don't live in an ideal world. Simply saying that is unacceptable will not change it any more than wishing on a star would.

I'm not saying that it's fair for video game studios to expect this from developers, but I'm saying that it *IS* something that is to be realistically expected, because without it, most game companies would just fold completely, or else game developers would either have to work almost entirely on commission, with a base salary comparable to that of a newly hired Walmart employee (and there wouldn't be any studios left at all capable of developing some of the really big titles). Why would anyone bother getting a degree in computer science for a career like that, exactly?

Re: No

[LinuxLuver]

I totally agree. The same goes for "internships". They are just stealing from kids.

Re: No

[Electricity Likes Me]

This is wrong. Peak oil is when new discoveries are outstripped by demand. Its the point at which the oil industry cannot grow at pace with demand, and must plateau and decline. Prices will shoot up instantly because month after month there will be less oil for per consumer available and no reasonable expectation of that changing.

Re:No

[PrimaryConsult]

If I worked 16 hours, the client was billed for 16 hours, and I was paid for 8 hours.

I met a contractor who had that same deal. Since it cost him nothing to do so, he would instead bill only for the 8 hours and continue to work the 16. With the money saved, the client were able to play a few games and get him switched to a different subcontractor, one which actually paid overtime.

Re:No

[pnutjam]

That's not true, plenty of places pay the same salary and don't expect more then 40 hours. I know that's something I ask up front when I interview.

Re:No

[obarel]

If I understand correctly, what you're saying is "the industry is bad, but it couldn't exist otherwise".

Isn't that the same as a factory that uses slave labour? If it didn't have slaves, it wouldn't be profitable and would fold. If the factory folded, you wouldn't be able to buy the ivory chess sets it was making. Paying for the skill required to make the chess sets is too expensive for the factory. Therefore it's OK to have slavery.

Slavery is great, but it was outlawed. Any company that depended on slave labour - folded. And that's a good thing. And we're still here, and we can live without ivory chess sets made by slaves.

(Note: I wish slave labour was gone from the world - it's still used in many parts of the world. But I'm not sure "the company would fold" or "if you live in this country you can expect to be a slave" are good excuses for it).

In other words, personally I could live without AAA titles made by slaves. There are a few game companies that somehow manage to make good games without killing their staff.

Re:No

[mark-t]

I'm saying that in my experience as a video game developer, the trend by companies that I've worked for seems to be to try to offer you a respectable salary in the first place to compensate to some degree for the times come that you *are* needed to put in a lot of extra hours. You aren't paid any extra for that time, but you aren't being paid too shabbily anyways... If such companies moved to paying overtime, then the base salary would need to be radically reduced, reducing it as an attractive choice for university graduates.

Re:No

[__aaclcg7560]

A manager at one company I worked for made a big deal out of giving me a 2% raise. He got mad when I pointed out that I previously got 50% raises, which meant I hit the salary cap three years before he did even though we were hired at the same time. Although he had a reputation for getting the numbers, I had a reputation for exceeding at all the odd jobs that no one else wanted.

Re:No

[ArmoredDragon]

No, it increased it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...

That said, a lot of commenters are making an incorrect assumption about why there are overtime rules. Overtime rules are designed as a soft-cap for the number of hours you're going to work (but punish your employer instead of you) under the theory that if they make people work fewer hours, then there will be more jobs available. But that theory is very wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are genuinely people who need extra hours of work because they aren't skilled enough to be worth a higher wage, so they work two jobs instead.

Re:No

[ArmoredDragon]

I am getting my data from the Federal Reserve's domestic and foreign data: http://research.stlouisfed.org... [stlouisfed.org]

Tons of data you can view there. Pull up France's 25 - 54 employment, and the US's. My statement is true.

That's not a smart way to do it actually. It's very much possible (and indeed common) to be fully educated AND looking for a job below the age of 25. That's why the BLS only counts you as unemployed if you're LOOKING for a job. If you're a student at age 30 for example, your figures count you as unemployed. When I was in college, I knew a LOT of people older than 25 that didn't work.

The BLS unemployment rate is an accurate figure for that reason, not your 25-54 figure.

Re:No

[beamdriver]

It's important to note that this is a clear violation of the exempt employee rule.

With some exceptions, the base pay of a salary basis employee may not be reduced based on the "quality or quantity" of work performed (provided that the employee does "some" work in the work period). This usually means that the base pay of a salary basis employee may not be reduced if s/he performs less work than normal, if the reason for that is determined by the employer. For example, a salary basis pay employee's base pay may not be reduced if there is "no work" to be performed (such as for a plant closing or slow period), and a salary basis employee's base pay may not be reduced for partial day absences. However, employers may "dock" the base pay of salary basis employees in full day increments, for disciplinary suspensions, or for personal leave, or for sickness under a bona fide sick leave plan (as for example if the employee has run out of accrued sick leave).

If the company is regularly doing this, employees classified as exempt could turn around and sue for unpaid overtime wages.

Re:No

[cerberusss]

I own a 10-person tech company in Canada and I have never made my employees work overtime. Ever.

That is commendable. But hasn't it ever occurred that you promise a client to deliver a certain date, and you made a mistake in planning? I could imagine that rather than disappointing the client, you try and work overtime to make good on your promises. Obviously you didn't do that, so how do you solve those problems?

Re:No

[Frobnicator]

The last company I worked for gave us comp time in lieu of OT.

That is another classic way to skirt the law, and is often done innocently as a lack of understanding.

Employers can use comp time in some circumstances, but it must be at the overtime rate. That is, if you were at the 1.5x rate they need to compensate you 1.5x the hours, if you were at the 2.0x rate they need to compensate you 2.0x the hours.

Many employers will compensate the hours 1:1. They cannot simply shift the hours from one week to the next and tell you "don't show up for x hours". It needs to be "don't show up for (1.5*x) hours" or whatever your proper overtime rate is.

Re:No

[NJRoadfan]

The problem is the law is outdated. How many computer related positions were there in 1975 compared to today? Why was computer related work singled out for exemption to begin with? I can see management being included as its a step up the corporate ladder (usually with better pay to match), but a broad job title not tied to a rank/level in a corporation shouldn't be included in the law.

Even the "management" exemption can be abused. A friend of mine was recently promoted to an "exempt" title of "Team Leader". The problem is shortly after the promotion, his boss pulled him from the responsibility of actually managing people (nobody reports to him and he no longer does tasks assigned to the job title). He is under the mistaken impression that all salaried employees are denied overtime, which is incorrect (method of paid doesn't correlate to the exemption).

IT Professionals should receive overtime

[Anonymous Coward]

Project managers should be held accountable for their dubious scheduling practices and failures to estimate and manage project schedules effectively. Greater reward for IT professionals working overtime would hopefully translate into more regular work schedules, rather than being coerced into taking time away from families and loved ones in order to cover a PM's butt.

Re:IT Professionals should receive overtime

[GrooveNeedle]

What's wrong with accountability?

Re:IT Professionals should receive overtime

[orlanz]

Very well said. Without overtime, there is an artificial unknown resource buffer. Rather than saying there are 120-140 man hours available this week for 3 resources, it ends up being anywhere from 120-300 hours.

HOW do you do planning on a 120-300 hour variance? 120-140 you can say give them 120 hours of work and if they need to stretch a little to 140; hopefully they will. And as a PM, I MUST make sure my 120 is accurate cause if I give them 150 hours... that is not a stretch, that is OVERTIME which hurts my project budget or delivery. Both I must explain to my stakeholders. On the flip side, with more accurate costs/planning/delivery known, the customer can actually make better decisions on what they will pay for and what they won't.

With the unknown variance, people start fantasizing that they are giving 50 hours of work when its actually 100. Then the attitudes start with thinking that it WAS 50 hrs of work and its the developer's own problem for taking longer. The project plans note 50 rather than the 100. Future projects look to the past to see that something was only 50 hrs and this lazy developer on this project is taking 200 for the same thing...

With the unknown, it just makes it all unaccountable and a dangerous wildcard that prevents accurate estimates. Plus to make matters worse, the middle 10-35 hours are FAR more productive than the hours 45-100. And we wonder why project deliverables suck, aren't on time, nor on budget. And even if I stuck to proper labor estimates, my competition won't, and I won't get any contracts... Even thou I can deliver a more accurate product, closer to time, and closer to budget at a TCO very close to the competitor who will waste resources on CYA and excuses for delays and result in an inferior product.

Honestly, people are very bad at judging labor to complete a task. And without regulations, we are leaving it to our human nature to set ourselves up for failure.

Re:IT Professionals should receive overtime

[wiredlogic]

Of course it's your fault for agreeing to the schedule.

Re:IT Professionals should receive overtime

[dbIII]

With respect (but not much of it), real engineers on non-IT projects have to cope with such situations, so why shouldn't IT people who call themselves engineers expect a free ride?

Ridiculous Laws

[Anonymous Coward]

As a computer programmer, I should get overtime pay when I'm asked to do the IT department's job on a busy event. I had to work wednesday, friday, saturday and sunday over thanksgiving "break" because the load balancer team has a POS Cisco load balancer that doesn't work.

I was up 25 hours starting monday and then after that I got 4 hours of sleep only to work for another 4. Yeah, things need to change! (and this was at a University)

Everyone?

[GrooveNeedle]

Why are we just discussing IT professionals?

Why not have everyone who works overtime (defined as work done after 40 hours for a given week) be paid time and a half, regardless of their profession/job?

And while we're on it, why not have a normal work week go back to 35 hours instead of 40?

Re:Everyone?

[blue9steel]

Why not have everyone who works overtime (defined as work done after 40 hours for a given week) be paid time and a half, regardless of their profession/job?

I believe this is the correct answer. Any employee, up to and including the CEO, who works more than 40 hours should make time and a half for overtime. That may mean many employees have their base salary adjusted to match the new expectations but overall it would be better for society and the economy.

Re:Everyone?

[DrStrangluv]

Disagree, because the probable result here is a lot of people taking a large cut to their base pay with the expectation that they make it up by doing overtime. In other words, it effectively increases the length of the work week without really increasing worker compensation.

Re:Everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Traditionally, executive-level positions have been exempt from the hours regulations for several reasons:

1) They commonly must work unpredictable hours, building their schedules around the availability of international parties, travel time, industry events, and so on. The overhead of tracking their hours is simply not worth the effort.

2) They commonly exercize significant authority over their own hours, being free to set their own schedules, and as such can self-direct into a proper balance. This further eliminates the need for meticulous time tracking.

3) They typically have authority over other people, and can delegate work to other people, giving them even more leverage to balance out their own time, further reducing the need for time tracking.

4) They typically get paid in a higher bracket than most workers, with a huge range of results-based incentive packages, thus keeping them well-compensated for whatever extra effort they choose to give (the import point being that for them it is a choice based on incentives, rather than a requirement that they must face industry-wide).

All of these reasons combined make it seem silly to impose hours-based work regulations on executive positions.

Of course, the legal game of getting this same exemption to apply to non-executive positions, or classifying positions as executive positions when they really aren't, is a whole different story. THAT is deliberate industry exploitation of labor, and that must be regulated (and stopped). And doing so is a huge uphill battle, because the option to exploit benefits the wealthy elite more than the regulations that would prevent it.

Re:Everyone?

[king neckbeard]

Because pretty much the only jobs that are exempt from overtime are medical professionals, managers, salesmen, and IT. Medical is likely to remain that way because of how hospitals work, managers pretty much have to have OT on big projects, and, salesmen often work in a manner that makes tracking actual hours of work impractical. IT is pretty much the only one that could change.

Re:Everyone?

[Echo_Hotel]

Shouldn't that trigger "Market Forces" to FORCE the wages back up.
The the market being IT work the force being the demand for proper pay?

Re:Everyone?

[gremlin_591002]

So, I've been an IT professional in the past and transitioned to industrial control systems. In IT I was a contractor that only got payed for my billable hours. I spent long days but got payed very fairly for the hours I billed.

When I moved into control systems my pay was negotiated as salary, I got insurance and retirement. But when I actually started working it was all figured hourly. The problem was it didn't matter how many hours I worked, I got payed for 40. I was always told to 'take time off', but there was never time. Always another project, always another emergency. 50 hours a week and on call every night became the norm. Eventually I got sick of it and switched jobs.

Now I'm actually an exempt employee. Most weeks are 40 hours, some are more like 50 and I get an occasional call at night. My boss is rabid about me taking a day off when I get a crappy week and never quibbles when the day is slack and I leave early. My team is expected to work 40 and OT is authorized as long as the employee isn't getting burned out. The only problem with this setup is it's easy to get slack. Without the constant pressure it's easier to let things slide. I find that if I drive my team hard on a project every couple of months, they stay more productive when the workload is normal.

It's been interesting to see how the individuals react to working conditions, what motivates them (and myself), and how to make sure they don't drive themselves too hard while still getting the job done.

Re:Everyone?

[ub3r n3u7r4l1st]

Because IT professionals in the USA lacks union representation, unlike other more advanced countries.

Re:Everyone?

[Em Adespoton]

Your last point is the only relevant one: if tracking hours is impractical, a different metric should be used. Otherwise, if everyone else uses the standard overtime rate, there's really no issue. With medical, it means that if you work more, you get paid more. That means that hospitals have to balance between overworked overcompensated staff and proper work balance. If the hospital is understaffed, their employees shouldn't be the ones to suffer. Same goes for teachers, IT, and anyone else that can track how they contribute to the business based on hours spent at the job.

For jobs that are more results-based than hours-based, where you agree to certain results going into the job, overtime doesn't really make sense. This is true for many executive positions and sales positions, as well as IT contractors (but not salaried IT).

Re:Everyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

My previous job, not in IT, also involved 50-60 hour weeks but I was salaried for 40. Didn't matter what I did, I was salaried for 40 so that's what I got paid.

I worked through my breaks (both paid and unpaid). When I didn't work through them, I was reprimanded.

I was told that I could take days off to make up for the extra time, but when I did, I was reprimanded.

The more hours I worked, the more work I was given. It wasn't long before I exceeded 60 hours a week, including on call, work from home and using my own equipment.

I burned out, and resigned.

The new girl in my old job? She works 43-45 hours a week, same salaried hours but at a lower rate. She has better equipment, fewer responsibilities, and gets both her breaks and her days off, without reprimand even.

It eventually turned out that the CEO, on $100k/year, wanted me out because he thought I was overpaid (at $32k/year).

That bitch is mine. I'm going to ruin him.

Re:Everyone?

[mrbester]

There's no union in UK either. I've never been paid overtime so I don't do it. I don't give a fuck if there's a deadline, I'm not working for free.

Re:Everyone?

[reboot246]

I'm in favor of including everyone, especially me!

I'm on a monthly salary and make more than the current limit of $23,660. Sure, I work the full 40 hours on the job and that IS actual work. We are charging our customers by the hour and they don't want me sitting around doing nothing. But driving time to and from the job is not included. Neither is time spent at night doing paperwork. Time at the office doing maintenance on our equipment is not counted. My average week is about 70 hours. I've had a few weeks of more than 90 hours. I'd love to be paid overtime. Where do I sign up?

Re:Everyone?

[Kjella]

This. Just because you're not a production line worker where you can measure that one hour = x widgets almost all professions are such that with more hours you get more done. If one surgery takes one hour you get more surgeries done in ten hours than in eight. That means there'll always be incentive for management to work you harder unless it costs them money. I don't like overtime pay because I think the total compensation gets better, you should always consider the rate of pay divided by hours worked so what you get paid for 60 hours salaried or 40 hours base + 20 hours overtime ought to be the same.

The difference is the incentive, once you start getting overtime pay it costs them more per hour so they try minimizing the need for it. If they're often using overtime they have the incentive to hire another worker to get it done during regular hours. I'd rather they have three people working 40 hours a week than two people at 60 hours a week. That way overtime is actually used for crunch time instead of running short normally and killing you on the crunch. If they're happy or unhappy with your performance they'll feel the same at 40 hours a week, everybody can put in hours. You're just screwing your own and your colleagues lives for your employer.

Re:Everyone?

[DigiShaman]

Agreed. Staff in the medical profession routinely get burned out. It's why the highly experienced specialized professionals that do stick around command a high salary. Now combine this with the ACA and the compounding effect is even more expensive healthcare for everyone. And unlike IT, outsourcing healthcare isn't that feasible except for the most basic of common colds and simple wellness checkups via Skype.

Re:Everyone?

[Edgester]

Why are we just discussing IT professionals?

We're discussing IT professionals because there is an overtime exemption for IT professionals, and IT professionals are heavily represented on Slashdot.

Re:Everyone?

[Cederic]

1 - yep, that's my job
2 - yep, that's my job
3 - no authority, but I delegate to people all the time, so close enough
4 - yep ("higher bracket" applies when I'm earning over twice the national average wage)

Well, I'm an IT professional. Sounds like you've just justified me being exempt from overtime.

That's fine, I work in the UK where almost nobody on a salary gets overtime. Unless they're in IT and asked to provide 'out of hours' support, in which case they get a small payment for being available and a large payment if they have to come into the office.

My career has averaged 40-50 hour weeks, with only a year at one job averaging 60. 40-45 is very sustainable, I'm averaging nearer 40 at the moment and although that translates at times to 4 ten hour days and Friday barely responding to emails the company measures me on contribution not time sat at my desk. I like that.

Re:Everyone?

[Cederic]

If one surgery takes one hour you get more surgeries done in ten hours than in eight.

You get higher failure rates too.

How are you measuring productivity here, people put under the knife, rather than people walking out of hospital alive? You're the sort of fuckwit that shouldn't be allowed to make business decisions.

Re:Everyone?

[obarel]

And I disagree with that. Why would the expectation be to work overtime? My expectation is not to work overtime. My expectation is to be paid for the time I work, and then go home and not work (and not get paid for that time). I think it's a reasonable expectation. If the result of such a law is that I earn less money, I'm allowed to accept that and settle for a lower salary in return for my personal time. Maybe many people think like you, and maybe many people think like me.

But such a law would give me a choice. Yes, I could decide to work overtime and make up for the lower salary (but at least get paid for my work), or I could decide not to. Currently it's either free overtime or no job.

Re:Everyone?

[mattventura]

But the problem is that over time, as more and more people do it, it becomes more and more of a necessity due to pushing the cost of labor down. If, overnight, everyone switched from 1 working adult households to 2 working adults, after the market had time to adjust, each family would be doing twice the work but not receiving twice the compensation.

Re:Everyone?

[Bengie]

I'm sure plenty of hospitals abuse their position, but I've seen hospitals where "not overworking" their workers means people die. Strange ethical dilemma. Town is too small to attract more workers and too poor to pay a regionally competitive wage, yet there is still demand for people to not die.

Re:Everyone?

[Bengie]

I was always told to 'take time off', but there was never time. Always another project, always another emergency.

We recently had this issue at my work when they wouldn't let anyone in the engineering department take time off for almost a year. Right when the project went live, HR stepped in and said these engineers HAD to take time off. The engineering manager got into A LOT of trouble when a huge portion of the engineering staff was out on vacation time at the same time for almost a month strait because HR said engineering overstepped their bounds. CEO was not mad at HR, that was HR policy created by the CEO. You have to use at least half of your vacation time each year. HR will not allow you to work once you've reached your limit. Yes, this is paid time off.

Needless to say, the project went live, lots of bugs were found, and no one was around to fix them. Lots of band-aids created, phone center getting hit hard, but HR would be damned if those engineers didn't get to use their hard worked vacation time.

Engineering had some restructuring after that indecent.

Re:Everyone?

[Em Adespoton]

I'm sure plenty of hospitals abuse their position, but I've seen hospitals where "not overworking" their workers means people die. Strange ethical dilemma. Town is too small to attract more workers and too poor to pay a regionally competitive wage, yet there is still demand for people to not die.

I think I already covered that -- hospitals that are short staffed need to provide longer hours for their employees -- and those longer hours need to be paid overtime. That overtime needs to be billed against the insurance companies, who will then come up with some creative way to get more workers in the local hospitals to defray their costs. The only difference is, in one case it's the workers who suffer so that people don't die, and in the other case it's the hospital and insurance companies (and by extension the insurance companies' customers) who suffer a little so that people don't die. The ethical dilemma becomes a bit clearer now, doesn't it?

Re:Everyone?

[Em Adespoton]

Oh yes, some other points: if the workers are bearing all of the burden of the lack of more workers by essentially working for free, that means:
1) the hospital, insurance companies and patients have no motivation to change things
2) the employees will burn out, thereby more people will die
3) there will be an ongoing reason why the hospital won't be attractive to potential employees

However, if they pay overtime:
1) the hospital, insurance companies and patients have motivation to change things
2) the employees are less likely to burn out and be better motivated on the job, enabling them to save more people
3) if the hospital pays overtime, this will attract more employees, who otherwise would have no reason to work below minimum wage for limited return, no matter their humanitarian bent.

No way, not for me

[Maow]

I'm a self-made man - I built the hospital I was born in, started teaching myself at age 11 months, and I got to where I am on my own.

I don't need the nanny state to make sure I and my peers are fairly compensated.

What's next, mandatory clean water? Then clean air? Where does it end?

Socialism, that's where.

No way, not for me!

Re:No way, not for me

[Archangel Michael]

Strawman arguments. Liberals love them!

But you failed. You forgot to mention Somalia!

Re:No way, not for me

[UnknownSoldier]

Ha! Best comment on /. today.

Very nice.

Re:No way, not for me

[khallow]

Except nobody is working for nothing. This seems to be forgotten rather often.

Re:No way, not for me

[Maow]

Strawman arguments. Liberals love them!

Damn right!

I had to get up at the crack of dawn to tend my straw farm (on land I built with my own two hands) for it. Fortunately, in southern Canadian winters, the crack of dawn is not much before noon, but still...

I can't wait for global warming to increase the temperature; I'm going to switch to coconuts, I've heard they're easier. They don't need much sunlight, do they?

Our liberal plot of global warming is coming along brilliantly!

But you failed. You forgot to mention Somalia!

Remember, Somalia is also a liberal plot to make libertarians look bad.

Re:No way, not for me

[khallow]

Then work 40 hours. Of course, it's not as simple as you put it, since you then aren't meeting the expectations of the employer who isn't paying you to work a certain number of hours, but rather to do a job.

Not just yes, but HELL, YES!

[whitroth]

Old-style "salaried" meant that you didn't have to worry about your hours, and neither did your managers - you'd get you work done, and could take off, say, for a federal holiday. Now - I'd put down a $10 that 99% of you who are in IT work, or have worked, over 40 hours, had vacation time or holidays that you couldn't take, or, like I do, have to "make up" the hours if the federal gov't shuts down or has a holiday, and we *don't*.

By definition, it means what you're really just fairly well-paid hourly employees. *Hourly* employees get time and a half overtime, and double time for working on, say, holdiays. But you're all making *so* much money that you don't care (nor do you have a life outside of work), right?

                  mark "would be seriously tempted to strangle a manager who said, 'whatever it takes'"

Re:Not just yes, but HELL, YES!

[pixelpusher220]

not just aerospace. Pretty much any contractor to the federal govt has to do this. I"m currently on a Dept of State project and it's the same deal. I'm salaried/exempt but have to report hours worked AND can't work 10 extra this pay period and bill short next pay period like any sane accounting system.

Re:Not just yes, but HELL, YES!

[tompaulco]

A lot of industries account for your time based on hours worked, but account for your pay based on salary. Even the time off is added up based on the hours you work and assumes 40 hours per work. So you don't accumulate any more paid time off from working overtime either. A lot of companies have project management systems in which they require you to log all 40 hours that you worked, and you can't log more than 40 even if you worked more than 40. And if you log under 40 you are penalized, just as you indicate happens in aerospace.
I'm kind of surprised they don't start docking more than 8 hours for a day off of work since they normally expect you to work 12 hour days.
Basically, the industry has become one where the employer gets to have their cake and eat it to. All the rules apply only in their favor and their is nothing in the contract which benefits the employee.

Re:Not just yes, but HELL, YES!

[guruevi]

I always knew that salaried meant work whenever you want, as long as you get the job done, nobody cares. If you HAVE to be at your job 40h/week then you are an hourly employee and should be treated as such with overtime paid.

Without overtime, it leaves room for abuse.

[dirtaddshp]

By the way, you can thank Kay Hagan for taking mandatory OT from computer workers. A bunch of telecom companies lobbied to ban mandatory OT and Kay was happy to take all of that money from them. http://www.tomsitpro.com/artic...

Re:Without overtime, it leaves room for abuse.

[thaylin]

You do realize that died right?

S. 1747 (112th): Computer Professionals Update Act
Introduced:
Oct 20, 2011 (112th Congress, 2011–2013)
Status:
Died (Referred to Committee) in a previous session of Congress

Why are we asking this?

[podom]

No.

As an IT Manager

[Stargoat]

I'm an IT Manager. I weekly am required to make my dudes work 45-50 hours. Two or three times a year, they put in 65 - 70 hour weeks. They get nothing for the OT except MAYBE comp-time. I don't even get the comp-time.

I am in favor of this. If the IT dudes were treated the same as everyone else, they wouldn't be required to work themselves half to death and get a reputation for being sullen.

Re:As an IT Manager

[RingDev]

Also an IT Manager. I try to keep my team capped out at 42 hours per week. Every once and a while we'll have some sort of emergency, but that's where comp time comes in.

As an IT manager, my week starts at 42 hours and grows from there. I'll be pushing 50 on this week by the time I leave for the night.

And my day today included interviews for an additional permanent BA/PM, 6 mainframe developers, and I was told by my boss that we were going to "load balance" from the C#/GSI team onto my Java team, that I would be getting at least 4 more projects, 2 FTEs, and probably half a dozen contractors.

So if there is any change to over time reqs, please let them include us!

-Rick

Re:As an IT Manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Why put up with this? Seriously, family is much more important. If everyone worked 40 and went home, then what? It's ridiculous that pointy-haired bosses think this is acceptable, and then they spend Friday on the golf course. Go home at 40 hours. If they fire you, find a job where you'll be treated like a human being.

Re:As an IT Manager

[JesseMcDonald]

On one hand, people should get paid for putting in extra hours.

No, and that misconception is part of the problem. People should get paid more for accomplishing more, regardless of how much time they spend on it. I'm no fan of long work weeks, but that just means that expectations ought to be set based on what an average employee can accomplish in 35-40 hours rather an 50-60. If you happen to be less productive than the average employee you can either put in more time or settle for a lower salary.

However, that's more or less how it already works for salaried positions. If most employees were already putting in 45-50 hours when you signed up, then you should have considered that when negotiating your salary. It's wrong to look at it as if you'd agreed to 40 hours and were later forced to work extra "for free". Even if the policy changed after you were already working there, you can always renegotiate. (And if that isn't an option due to competition for your job, it's a sign that you're already getting a relatively good deal which other candidates would be glad to accept.)

Re:As an IT Manager

[khallow]

Seriously, family is much more important.

Unless, of course, it's not. Assertions are always true, except when they aren't.

Re:As an IT Manager

[toebob]

Many jobs have no meaningful metric for measuring accomplishments. You can't measure "kept data center well maintained" or "manned customer support line, addressing client issues" without considering hours spent on the task. Most of IT operations is based on avoiding any interruption to the rest of the workforce. The best system admins are practically invisible.

Re:As an IT Manager

[khallow]

Sentences assert things.

Except when they don't. A sentence that asserts something is an assertion. A sentence that doesn't, isn't an assertion.

Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

Exempt status used to be reserved for highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, managers).

At my last company, they made people work 72 hours a week for months. We had multiple heart attacks- and several divorces. They took advantage of the bad job market created partly by the fact that companies can work IT people 72 hours a week.

Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income or you are supervising, hiring, firing, and making pay decisions over at least a few other people.

Any work on actual holidays should be double time.

Conditions in many IT shops in the united states are horrific now.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to work slave!

America land of the flea home of the slave!

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

At my last company, they made people work 72 hours a week for months.

Me too. In my case it was the US Air Force.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[KeithJM]

The thing is that this is really short-sighted (I say this as a development manager). You can force people to work long hours in a horrible job market -- but 100% of your good developers are going to jump ship the moment the market turns around. The only time this strategy makes sense is when two things are both true: 1. The job market is so bad even great developers are scared to quit 2. Your company is so close to going out of business that you don't have the option to think even medium term. You only care about the next month or two of results.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

The fun part is when the resulting mess from this slave labor environment is fixed by paid consultants that bill actual hours, at higher rates.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[serviscope_minor]

Good developers will even be able t ojump in a bad market.

The people who most desperately cling to a shitty job are the wretched incompetents who couldn't get employed elsewhere. It's 100% the best way to have the most useless people working for you.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Wycliffe]

Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income

Most people working in the IT industry ARE in the top 20%. The top 20% of wage earners(not households)
in the USA starts at about 53k.

I think exempt status should only be allowed for people that both don't track their hours and have a fixed workload.
Most of the IRS rules for contractor vs employee should also apply. If an employer can tell you when to start,
how long to stay, can give you more work, tracks your hours, etc... then you shouldn't be allowed to be exempt.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

Lol.

Nailed it. Only they didn't fix anything. As far as we could tell, many of the $150 to $200 per hour consultants were training on our dime. About 90% of them. The other 10% were very good and worth every dime. So we were covering about 60 people who were about as good as we were and 6 people who were solid gold and worth every penny.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

Your figure is way off.

53k is the middle income amount..

Here are the 2010 figures from the CBO
Lowest Quintile 14,200
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --Here is where people should be exempt from overtime rules.

Most people in IT are in the lower end to the middle of the fourth quartile making $60,000 to $110,000 (and above $100k your odds of being let go/replaced every couple years skyrocket).

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

I already posted this in another thread but...

CBO 2010 income quintiles.
Lowest Quintile 8,100
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --- this is where people should be exempt from overtime unless they are a manager.

I could see the argument you are making for managers but they were always expected to work overtime in return for a shot at being a vice president, president, CEO or chairman of the board.

Special rules were passed in the 1980's exempting computer professionals and engineers from labor law protections already in place. These days the exceptions even applies to people who simply install software on computers.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Wycliffe]

I'm not sure where you got those numbers but they are either wrong or very misleading.
234k puts you in the top 1% of wage earners in the USA.
Here is a tool that lets you put in your income and it gives you where you fall.
http://politicalcalculations.b...
60k falls at 80.1% based on 2013 data for an individual wage earner.
234k falls at 99.2% for an individual wage earner.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

I got them from the Congressional Budget Office.

Here is a 2009 document that shows the top quintile then was 218,800
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/defau...

Okay- I see that while it's not as low as you are saying, I did make a mistake using the average. Here is a breakdown by smaller pieces from the same document.
81st to 90th Percentiles 125,800
91st to 95th Percentiles 169,800
96th to 99th Percentiles 266,200
Top 1 Percent 1,219,600

But keep in mind these figures are from 5 years ago. On the same 2013 version of the document, the average was 234k instead of 219k The 81th to 90th percentiles was higher in 2012 (I vaguely recall that it was 131k) and so on.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Wycliffe]

Yeah, those are also household incomes where a household on average has 1.7 wage earners.
Overtime pay has always been individual and probably never will be based on household.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Shortguy881]

Link to that article because those numbers are not right. 20% of individuals in the US do not make upwards of 234,400. 20% of households don't make that.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

This discussion has been pretty helpful for me.

I'm in a high income crowd and had crossed household income with personal income because we individually all make as much as households.

Personal income here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Shows median personal income is somewhere between $27500 and $29999.
$25,000 to $27,499 48.01 make less.
$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 make less.

And more to the point, in a greement with your figures...

$57,500 to $59,999 1,876 0.89 80.90% make less.

Of course, that's not correcting for age and includes a lot of 18-26 year olds who haven't started their first "real" job yet. But point taken.

Re:Abuse of overtime is resulting in unemployment

[Maxo-Texas]

I see the mistake I was making.

Lol. It sort of made me feel better as I've been comparing my income to household income.

There is still a minor gap between our figures and then one issue with the data..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

$27,500 to $29,999 52.16 Median income.appears about $29000.

The 80% level
$57,500 to $59,999 80.90 agrees with your figures

$100,000 or more 93.39 The top 6.4% make over 100k

--
Okay the problem.
This data which agrees with your figures includes "Of those individuals with income who were older than 15 years of age,"

So it has about 8 years worth of millions of young people who really not representative of people working for a living but rather working for a little extra spending money. It also includes millions of retired seniors with any income besides social security. Like the retired guy who works at my kroger two days a week.

If you look at actual prime working year people, you have two major groups
Overall median wage: 39,509 This is $10,000 higher than the figure above.
College Grad median wage: $56,027.

So it seems reasonable that among the "real" working population the 80% level is closer to $70,000.

Yes.

[Animats]

And double time on Sundays.

Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.

Re:Yes.

[SeaFox]

Are you really saying there should be one day of the week where this applies (the day being irrelevant), or can you give an argument why Sunday should be special -- an argument has nothing to do with religion?

Re:Yes.

[zeroduck]

Because thats when most of the (professional American) football games are on?

But seriously, it makes sense in a secular way. Most people in non-customer service type jobs work Monday through Friday, normally. Those days are out, leaving us with Saturday and Sunday. Saturday is acceptable, but I think a stronger argument could be made for Sunday. Since most people would start their work week on Monday, at an absolute bare minimum, they should have the one day off before to rest up before starting the new week.

That said, I think there is a strong case for seriously disincentivizing employers requiring their employees to work 7 days a week, but that might not be practical for businesses that are open 7 days a week. In those cases, I think the day of week could be arbitrary chosen for/by each employee.

Re:Yes.

[dbIII]

It was baked into the religion for the same reasons as the ten commandments - to produce a society that was more than barbarism. It's harder for the unscrupulous to work their slaves to death if they have people looking over their shoulder demanding that nobody works 7 days a week.

Re:Yes.

[SydShamino]

I see no need to make Sundays special, but I do think the government should mandate triple overtime for work done on the three major secular holidays - Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving. This would be for work performed from 2AM day of until 6 the next morning, so you can close the night before but then have a day with your family.

The public would happily pay for police, EMS, fire, and medical staffs, who would appreciate the extra pay. I suspect Walgreens and CVS would stay open with a few stores, as would some gas stations (obviously self employed are exempt and can work when they wish). The rest would get the government-endorsed time off they deserve or be compensated.

Re:Yes.

[mrchaotica]

Clearly, any business that's open 7 days a week should split their workforce into 7 groups and give each group a different day off.

Re:Yes.

[Animats]

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.

Re:Yes.

[jordanjay29]

Probably because if you're working Sunday, it means you're not getting another day off for at least 5 more days (M-F).

Re:Yes.

[PrimaryConsult]

Memorial Day and Labor day are major shopping days though - a triple overtime requirement would pretty much kill that. The retail employees working that day are often students who want the extra pay, and those shopping are people who appreciate the extra day off to go shopping. Neither of those are particularly "family days".

And for those who are unable (or unwilling) to spend time with family, it's nice that some places are open on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

At *most*, require holiday work give a 25% bonus or an equivalent amount of time off to be used on any arbitrary day in the future. It's enough that there is incentive to let people have the day off, but not so much that entire towns become ghost towns, with only a handful of places being open but so swamped that shopping is a miserable experience.

Walmart would *love* a 3x overtime rule, they'd have no problem staffing stores to the bare minimum knowing full well that they would have to beat customers away with a stick vying for the "privilege" of waiting 3 hours in line to check out... since they'd be the only ones open.

Salary versus wages

[goombah99]

Are they not on salary? if so there's already an exemption in place.

A big fat no!

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have worked at a very few places where it was cool hip and fun. Working late into the night was a joy and basically hanging out with like minded people. But the vast majority of programmers are wage slaves working in cubeville. Terrible management often results in death marches where programmers are basically expected to work 24 hours a day and sleeping is barely tolerated. These death marches are basically the norm at most companies seeing that most managers/marketing people over promise, under manage, and under pay their staff.

These programmers desperately need protection. The few places where happy people love their jobs do not justify allowing companies (especially game companies) to exploit their workers to the point where their wives start an organization to protest the horrible working conditions (literally).

Re:A big fat no!

[radarskiy]

How is your argument consistent with your title of "A big fat no!"?

Re:A big fat no!

[EmperorOfCanada]

A big fat no to any exemption for programmers. Not no to overtime regulations. I can remember a clear case of a friend of mine who was hired at a local, but large, consultancy; they promised and swore on a stack of bibles that it was 9-5 all the way. So he signed on for a fairly senior manager's job and his co-managers just laughed and non could basically remember not working past 7 or not working at least one day on the weekend. So he left on his first day. The place he had left gladly took him back as they had parted on very good terms and the reason for leaving was the wildly better paycheck at the new place.

As a senior manager he knew that there was nothing he could have done about it. What chance did Joe code monkey have?

A job is a job, if not overworking programmers results in these companies having to hire more programmers then good. I see no magical exception as to why programmers should be punished.

Re:A big fat no!

[radarskiy]

Thank you for the clarification. I tripped over the the double negatives.

Re:A big fat no!

[EmperorOfCanada]

I ain't won't never not do that again.

Salaried positions only make sense in a few cases

[Wycliffe]

Salaried positions only make sense in a few special cases.
An accountant who is really busy at the end of each month but has very little to do in the middle
is one example. Most IT doesn't fall in that category. In most jobs if you finish what you're
doing there is always something more to do. If you can't run out of things to do then you shouldn't
be salaried. Even for those few jobs where you can run out of things to do, if you required overtime
pay then compensation would adjust accordingly where their hourly wage would be reduced a little
to make up for the busy time where they are making time and a half.
Another option for those few rare cases would be to allow yearly averaging and only require paying
overtime if the average for the year is over 40. That would make for a nice christmas bonus.
At the company I work for everyone is hourly and if you don't hit your 40, no big deal, you just get
a slightly smaller paycheck that week. We encourage people to try to get close to 40 and encourage
people to not go over 40 but if they do occasionally go over we pay overtime and don't question it.
Most companies seem to use exempt as just a way to get more hours out of people for free.

Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

Overtime of 1.5x or 2x discourages employers from having overtime, and instead hire more people. It's generally better for unemployment numbers to employe more people full-time than it is to over-employ fewer people by having them work lots of overtime.
Employees are somewhat discouraged to work overtime long term because usually the extra money is not worth it. But let us not pretend that employees have much say in when and how they work. They don't usually have a lot of bargaining power.
But labor unions do have a lot of bargaining power, and they have consistently pushed to have lots of overtime hours at a high pay so that union members can effectively net higher incomes. Higher incomes are usually good for individuals, unless they are doing it just to scrape by or have no choice in finding a good work-family balance. Higher incomes are almost always better for unions as it can increase the dues they collect without diluting their voting blocs with the introduction of a lot of new members.
The system of employers and unions is quite corrupt, I hope that isn't a surprise to any of you.

I think employers should pay 3x overtime, but only give 1.5x to the employees and 1.5x goes into a social program. I don't really care which one, but best to pick one that has the right poetic justice. Like financial support for the unemployed, or healthcare for the poor. If you're force to work 10 hour days, might as well force you to send the money to someone who can use it rather than line the pockets of your union reps. I was tempted to suggest that it would be 1x to the employee and 2x to a fund, but I know that it would make it easier for people to collude to work off the clock if there is zero benefit to whistle-blowing. (not that 50% of your hourly rate is much payment for something high risk like reporting your company for fraud)

The other advantage of having the overtime go to a fund is when a business tries to commit fraud it becomes a type of tax fraud. The IRS is way more aggressive at pursuing tax fraud than the various state agency that handle prosecution of compensation that violates state code.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[tsstahl]

So... my overtime pay should be more, but taxed at a flat rate of 50%?

I am not in your voting block. :)

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[swb]

I think economists have debunked the idea that working hours are zero sum and that reducing them (eg, to 35 hours a week from 40) gets you more jobs.

I would assume it would be much cheaper to pay 1.5x for extra time than to hire more employees. More employees means benefits and additional work resources (desks, phones, computers, office space, supervisory time, etc).

I think the blue collar OT incentives are mostly about low pay to begin with -- they don't make much money to begin with, so the OT is seen as welcome additional income. With otherwise well-paid white collar workers, there would be less of an incentive but that's highly individual -- I'm sure there are many people with kids in college, people that want a new car, etc would love the extra pay.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[trout007]

I think the original reason is that employee benefits are typically calculated over 40 hours. So after 40 hours the cost of the employee actually goes down to the employer.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[mark-t]

When the work that is being done is physical labor, hiring more people to get the job done on time makes sense.

There are intellectually demanding jobs such as software engineering where adding more people to a job will not necessarily make it get completed similarly sooner (there are rapidly diminishing returns after only a very small number of engineers on any single project).

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[LessThanObvious]

Negative consequences of allowing employees to work is double edged sword. A hard worker who wants the money should be able to work extra hours without it being punitive, but someone being forced to work extra because they are salaried is a serious downside. Paying workers time and a half is good, but it gives employers a disincentive to allow a worker who wants to, to work a 50 hour week. Just like when we attach health care to full time job we get the unintended consequence of masses of part time jobs. It's not good for those workers to only have the choice of under-employment VS two part-time jobs. Sure now they get subsidized Obamacare, but they pay for it and so do we. Businesses should see anyone willing to work for cheap as a gift and treat them as such rather than penny pinching treating them like expendable garbage.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[dbIII]

That's sometimes when you find that a project is too large and needs to be divided into sub-projects and need to allocate more resources to the bottlenecks.
If someone is doing all of X which depends on Y and Z that they are also doing you can sometimes farm Y and Z out to others. Feedback loops can be a delay on some things, but a lot of stuff can be divided up so you have a lot of people working on it without treading on each others feet and duplicating efforts.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[Darth Muffin]

If you make OT much more than 1.5x, then companies will just start hiring 2x the workforce and only scheduling them 20hrs/wk until the demand hits. Then they can just bump up hours temporarily rather than pay OT.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

You shouldn't be encouraged to work overtime.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

citation please. I'd be interested in that.

The overhead for employees is almost exactly 50%. It's not much cheaper, it's a wash really. This assumes employers aren't paying for healthcare, which they don't for part time workers today, and won't for most full time works under ACA.

Having worked blue collar jobs (construction, iron foundry), and growing up in a mixed semi-rural community of mostly blue collar and some white collar families, I can say that OT is very much a double edge sword for us. Most of my peers didn't want to work OT too much except around Christmas where the extra money can be used to keep debt off their credit card. (We still bought gifts for our families even if we didn't have the money)
You never seem to get ahead working OT, you end up home less, buying take-out more, and when the OT dries up then the income you used to count on disappears in a week. Working OT and living paycheck to paycheck tends to result in not being able to pay most of your bills.

To me, OT never felt like I was being rewarded. I did the exact same job, sometimes I was paid more than others. My normal pay started to feel more like I was being paid a discount rate. And OT felt more like what the job was worth.

Getting bulk rate prices on the first 40 hours seems kind of backwards.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

9 hour days, 5 days a week was sort of the perfect amount of OT at my factory job (so 45 hours / week). For me it was an extra $70 in my paycheck every week, which is nice.
Obviously I'd rather get paid that same total amount and work fewer hours.

But when OT becomes a big percentage of your daily life and the bulk of your paycheck I strongly suspect that the employer has being paying too little for the base wage and is abusing a situation that employees have little control over.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

I work on multiple software projects. But I could work more on fewer projects if we had more people.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

Right now most people don't get a choice. You work the hours, maybe some people like working extra hours, I know some people (myself) don't like working the extra hours.

If you're such a workaholic you can find a second job. If the state has non-compete laws to prevent this, then we should address that barrier.

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[OrangeTide]

having a 20hr/wk job is better than having a 0hr/wk job!

having one person with a 60hr/wk job and another with a 20hr/wk job seems unfair to me as well. (assuming both people would prefer to move close to 40hr/wk)

The ideal from the point of view of the masses would be for maximum choice. To work any amount of time they chose, without concerns if a company is hiring or not. But I don't know how to get to fantasy land, so I believe a reasonable compromise from maximum choice is for most people to have some kind of job. And other people to not have to commit to too much of a job to survive.
(obviously not a problem that can be fully solved in a dozen posts)

Re:Overtime system provides the wrong incentives

[swb]

citation please. I'd be interested in that.

The reduction in hours is exactly what France did several years ago in an attempt to decrease unemployment and it didn't work. The comment about reductions in hours not increasing unemployment was related to the French experience.

I still think the cost factor for hiring more employees vs. paying overtime is still cheaper for overtime. I think there are a lot aspects in finding and training employees that have second order effects (like, draining a manager's time from management tasks) which have costs associated with them that are hard to measure.

It may work in some simple labor environments and in some specific kinds of firms have a labor structure built around temporary and seasonal labor but it's much harder in white collar environment like IT.

And when it's done, it's very expensive. I work for an IT consultancy -- we're far from "high end" so it's not unusual that when we are called in for a project it's less about the specialized knowledge involved and more about the on site IT not having the time to do the project. But we often bill $180/hr for 40-50 hour projects -- that's more than double (maybe triple even) the overtime pay the onsite would people get if they just worked "overtime" on the project.

Re:The road to hell

[amRadioHed]

How many people actually agree to working free overtime during negotiations with potential employers?

Another billionaire proposes to help the economy

[Presto Vivace]

by taking money out of worker's pockets and putting it into his own.

Re:In California you need to be making $83,000

[taustin]

However, you need to know the precise definition of "computer employee" in California. It is intended to cover programmers, and specifically exempts people who work mainly with hardware. And if your primary job is manipulating data, you're an administrative employee, not a computer employee.

(I know all this because our then-new HR director tried to classify me as a computer employee, which would mean I'd have to start punching a timeclock. I objected - it'd be a pain in the ass to have to track whether or not I had to put my pants on when I got a weekend call, and, equally important, my employer does not abuse the salaried exempt status - I average about 40 hours a week, overall, despite occasionally having multiple 12+ hour days in the same week. And while I do hardware, and networking, and all those usual IT things, the majority of my time is spent manipulating data, so I managed to get reclassified as an administrative employee. I almost hope that we get audited by the labor board someday, and they object to me being exempt. I swear I'll show up at that meeting with my own lawyer, to represent me against the labor board.)

Not all employers of IT people abuse them.

Betteridge

[PPH]

No.

Strange. because it has been a few decades since I was in the salaried worker pool. But way back then, I wasn't aware of a threshold. I got overtime (1.5x) or not depending on the definition of my job. And back then I was bringing in around $150K/year.

The OT/no OT decision was based on the definition in the National Labor Relations Act of an exempt professional: doing work

"involving the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment in its performance"

and

"of such a character that the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time"

So when the boss walked up and told me how to do my job, or told me that he expected me to work to a rigid schedule, I just replied, "Thanks buddy. That'll be $120/hour for anything over 40 hours per week. Or get your damned nose out of my cubicle and I'll solve the problem as best I can."

In spite of this sounding like a rather snotty attitude, it did serve to remind my employer of the economics of employees as a resource. You want X done at a certain rate (lines of code, sheets of engineering drawings or pages of specifications), fine. Pay for the work by the hour. You want me to take on some risk for getting a challenging job done? I'll work for a fixed price, but only if I have the flexibility to control my processes, tools and working environment. Quite a few enlightened managers saw the value in the latter option.

Re:Betteridge

[RightwingNutjob]

I'll add another wrinkle to the above: if you're salaried and subject to overtime regs, you now have to account for your time, and you are just setting yourself up for a confrontation over whether having a great idea in the shower and working it out on a napkin at breakfast counts for time-and-a-half.

Re:Betteridge

[sdguero]

Agreed. All of the talented and seasoned Engineers I have worked with share this approach. And it works wonders for your stress levels and family life.

Re:Betteridge

[radarskiy]

This is the second comment I've seen that says "no" and then proceeds to give the "yes" argument.

Re:Betteridge

[PPH]

No, IT workers should not be exempt from being paid OT. If they work as self-directed professionals, then yes they can be. But right now, management wants it both ways: Treat IT people like assembly line grunts. But don't pay them OT anyway. Because there is a blanket exemptionin place.

any salary at or under 100k/yr should get OT

[mrflash818]

In my opionion any salary, IT or not, at or under, US$100k/yr should be paid overtime for over 40hrs/wk.

It should be inflation-adjusted each year, as well.

Re:any salary at or under 100k/yr should get OT

[KeithJM]

Live for a while on $100K in a rural Alabama, and then try it in the San Francisco Bay area. Then come back and tell us that there is a specific number that should be used to determine if you make enough money, regardless of your cost of living.

Re:any salary at or under 100k/yr should get OT

[Matheus]

Ignoring the problems with the flat number ignoring cost of living mentioned by my fellow commenters...

Since this particular number would not help me I want to mention the problem that I would like to have fixed: Excessive / required overtime. As a salaried employee I never really expected to get overtime based on my field / earnings and I really have no problem working variable hours and always getting the same paycheck so long as those hours balance out to something somewhat fair.

My previous job blew that "fair" ratio way out of the water. Specifically this would occur when we were on-site. Those trips almost always required more than 40 hours in a week because we were spending long hours troubleshooting the whole reason we had to be on-site in the first place. 50-60 hours weeks were pretty typical. I had a sequence of trips where that blew up to 100 hours / wk. At some point I forced the company to compensate me for some of that but on their side, aside from me sticking to my guns and having a sympathetic Senior VP in my corner, they have no incentive to keep me anywhere close to my actual paid hours. In fact it is in their best interest that you work > 40 every week so they get more bang for their buck. Making the bold statement "I only the 40 hours you pay me for" is great in a perfect world but when the job doesn't get done or done right on time then that's of small consolation. Having to pay (even regular pay) for any hours over 40 gives the company an incentive to hire enough staff or otherwise keep your workload manageable in a normal week.

Honestly I don't care if I get time and a half... sure it'd be great but I make plenty per hour I just want to get paid for ALL of those hours. THAT is a big reason why I work as a consultant now. I work exactly 0 hours I don't get paid for and that makes me happy. If a project doesn't have a budget for overtime then I go home after 40 and get to enjoy my life outside of work. The project I'm on just decided they wanted to fix some schedule issues and approved overtime so I'm now working more than 40 hours a week and getting paid for them all. I like it.

Re:any salary at or under 100k/yr should get OT

[Wycliffe]

If you don't like it, move. Otherwise stop whining that the benefits of living somewhere nicer cost more.

It depends on your definition of nice and and what benefits are important to you.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in SF. Yes, there are some benefits but there are many benefits to Alabama too.
If I had to choose between the two, I would probably choose Alabama. Luckily though there are plenty of other
places which (for me) have a much better combination of benefits.

Re:The road to hell

[unimacs]

Everything is worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it, but they are sure happy to pay a lot less if they can.

Decades ago workers figured out that they collectively they have a lot more negotiating power than individually and companies have been fighting that ever since.

Re:The road to hell

[blue9steel]

So changing the work environment regulations doesn't count as negotiations?

N/A

[__aaclcg7560]

My contract specifically states that I can't work any overtime at all. I can only work from Monday through Friday during normal business hours. That's fine with me.

Wouldn't change anything in IT

[DrStrangluv]

Only workers earning an annual income of under $23,660 qualify for mandatory overtime. Many millions of Americans are currently exempt from the overtime rules — teachers, federal employees, doctors, computer professionals, etc.

So let's say they "fix" the computer professionals exemption. If that happens, it defaults back tot he $23,660 rule. How many IT pros do you know that make $23,600 or less?

Re:Wouldn't change anything in IT

[en.ABCD]

From http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtim... :

To qualify for the computer employee exemption, the following tests must be met:

• * The employee must be compensated either on a salary or fee basis at a rate not less than $455 per week or, if compensated on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour;
• * The employee must be employed as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field performing the duties described below;
• * The employee’s primary duty must consist of:
• • * The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
  • * The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design specifications;
  • * The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to machine operating systems; or
  • * A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of skills.

The computer employee exemption does not include employees engaged in the manufacture or repair of computer hardware and related equipment. Employees whose work is highly dependent upon, or facilitated by, the use of computers and computer software programs (e.g., engineers, drafters and others skilled in computer-aided design software), but who are not primarily engaged in computer systems analysis and programming or other similarly skilled computer-related occupations identified in the primary duties test described above, are also not exempt under the computer employee exemption.

If the "computer professional" part is removed, then the entire exemption goes away (unless one of the other exemptions applies). The other exemptions only apply to other specific jobs, excepting the "highly compensated" exemption, which is currently pegged at $100,000 per year.

Hey have I ever mentioned

[NotSoHeavyD3]

That it's pointless to make your workers work over 40 hours a week because over the long term (IE more than 2 or 3 weeks) you literally can't get more than 40 hours a week worth of work out of anyone? I think I've mentioned this before. (Actually I agree with other Slashdot posters that you should expect 20-30 hours of week of real work.

Re:Hey have I ever mentioned

[sudon't]

Depends on the type of work, I guess. Truck drivers are expected to work up to 70 hours per week, (at least, that's the legal limit), and as long as they can stay awake behind the wheel, the work is getting done. If your job is to stand in front of a machine, feeding it parts or whatever, it's likely they're still getting productivity out of you. But, forgive me, we were speaking of the middle class...

Re:The road to hell

[BarbaraHudson]

Well, seeing as with Citizens United corporations are now people, maybe tech workers need to lobby to be considered as people too ...

Re:Wage theft.

[Troy Baer]

Being salaried, but worked so many hours that you effectively make less than minimum wage, is exploitation pure and simple.

I thought it was called "graduate school"...

Re:Overtime should be illegal.

[magarity]

The 40 hour work week and overtime pay was a part of Roosevelt's New Deal as a scheme to get more people employed, at least part time. It wasn't part of anyone striking or dying.

That reminds me, you know who doesn't do overtime?

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Olympic athletes. The usually train anywhere from 15-30 hours a week.(Really, google it.) They may train really hard but even they know that doing your best and doing overtime do not go together.

Finally stuff that matters!

[Provocateur]

Throw in Orion splashdown news, and there will be hope for slashdot. And Mars.

It's less about total hours than when

[swb]

I work as an IT consultant and it's less about total hours than when those hours are. I would rather have 50 hours in a 5 day week if they are contiguous hours than 40 hours during a work week with only 5 extra hours thrown in at random all hours of the night and weekend.

It's chaotic scheduling and short, just-enough-to-ruin-my-time-off hours that's more annoying than extra hours.

And I remember this quote which is apocryphally attributed to Soviet-era workers:

"They can never pay me less than I can work."

"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[Paul Fernhout]

Thanks for the link, AC: http://www.economist.com/blogs...
"Working hours: Get a life ... The Greeks are some of the most hardworking in the OECD, putting in over 2,000 hours a year on average. Germans, on the other hand, are comparative slackers, working about 1,400 hours each year. But German productivity is about 70% higher. ... So maybe we should be more self-critical about how much we work. Working less may make us more productive. And, as Russell argued, working less will guarantee âoehappiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia"."

Interesting comments there like on work culture in South Korea, and I've just read the first couple comments of hundreds...

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[rtb61]

Gees, troll much. What are the modders asleep. I have found those that work the hardest get paid the least. Just look at all the poor schlubs on minimum wage working two jobs, IT workers get it real easy compared to them. So a mandatory minimum wage that pays for the cost of living in conjunction with full overtime awards and to cap it off and get rid of often substandard health insurance and replace it with universal healthcare.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[TWX]

You're right that hours at the workplace are not necessarily hours spent working, but if an employee's workday is open-ended, then he's going to use time during the day for personal tasks or time.

If you do a good job defining working hours and reduce expectations for work and on-call response off of those defined work hours, you can then hold the employees to task. If you make the employee remain at the workplace for ten hours, you can expect that employee to use a cumulative couple of hours in the form of several sets of minutes through the day for their own things.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[puzzled_decoy]

Comparing across industries is pointless, or next to pointless. People who work the harder in their industry will almost always get paid more (barring other factors).

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[swamp_ig]

People who work the harder in their industry will almost always get paid more (barring other factors).

That's unfortunately nothing to do with how well they get paid.

Your pay level is largely about politics and self-promotion. (within a particular field and experience level)

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[Oligonicella]

Working better will do even more.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[roman_mir]

Another misconception, you are looking at the effect of a higher productivity - fewer work hours and then you decide that it is the cause of it.

I live in Germany on and off for half a decade now, so I can tell you this: it is the capital savings and investments that make Germans so productive, they have the savings that allow them to acquire/build the tools and train management and afford investments into technology that make their workers more productive and the more productive workers can work fewer hours. Unproductive workers can work a thousand hours and not be as productive as productive workers at a tenth of that time due to the difference in capital savings and investments.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[DMJC]

THIS, I recently started applying for new jobs not because I wanted to move on, but because I need to get a new bond together and by claiming overtime I can snatch some money back from my current employers. Suffice to say, I can walk into a $20,000 payrise just by showing up to an interview. Let alone having to do anything considered hard. ICT is all about having a specialty and just leveraging it. Also about being smart enough to know when you're getting screwed by your bosses and walking away. I'll be leaving a hastle full environment where I get called on weekends and out of hours to a strictly 9-5 monday to friday job where overtime has generous conditions attached.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[pnutjam]

Your flat out wrong. If you had read the article, you would see that profits are up, as a percentage of GDP, almost the exact amount that wages are down, as a percentage of GDP. Your calculations are perfect if you are in a vacuum and they make sense to a functional moron (sorry to break it to you).

To put it in simple terms, your bosses are keeping more money and giving you less. Companies are hoarding cash they could easily be paying to employees, and corporations are paying shareholders, or propping up their share price, at the expense of employees.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[Hognoxious]

Any wage does nothing. If it did, we could reinstitute slavery and eliminate unemployment overnight.

P.S. Shift key, motherfucker. Do you have one?

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[Hognoxious]

In terms of a programmer, which is easier to measure - how long he's at his desk, or what he actually produces?

For the typical PHB, that is.

Re:"Working hours: Get a life" at economist.com

[KozmoStevnNaut]

In fact, may people in Germany are classified as "working poor", since even their full-time job is not enough to earn them a living wage, they have to receive welfare payments as well.

Work in SF via telecommute from rural Alabama

[mrflash818]

Work in SF but do it via telecommuting from rural Alabama?

Re:Work in SF via telecommute from rural Alabama

[KeithJM]

The only downside to that plan is you have to live in rural Alabama (no offense to my Alabaman friends)

Re:Work in SF via telecommute from rural Alabama

[mrchaotica]

Are there really that many companies in SF that would let you telecommute 100% of the time like that?

Re: Overtime should be illegal.

[DrLang21]

Actually there have been quite as number of people killed striking. The Homestead Strike immediately comes to mind.

Re:Taken For Granted - Engaged in Race To Bottom

[__aaclcg7560]

Look at Apple and Google's illegal manipulation of the labor market.

That was to prevent each company from poaching their top talent. Those people would have gotten top dollar anyway. It had nothing to do with the general tech market.

Unless we organize we will continue to see declining wages and more demands placed upon us by management.

As a contractor, I work at all kinds of different companies. But I'm paid 80% more than someone who stayed at the same company for years and accepted 2% raises as normal. My contract also prohibits me from working overtime.

Enjoying OT for the first time in a long time

[genessy]

In my current position as a systems administrator for a financial holding company, I've been enjoying the fact I get over time for the first time in quite a while. My last two places of employment, I started out on hourly, and shortly after I was hired the whole department was changed to salary (no OT). One was private sector and one was public sector. Oddly enough, right before I was hired at my current place of employment, the IT staff had just gone the reverse transition due to an employee successfully arguing that we didn't qualify as exempt.

Most weeks, I put in 5 or less hours of overtime depending on the current load. However, when we acquire new banks or have a major project (like the Novell to AD transition), it's very easy for everyone involved to put in 20-30 hours extra per week. Of course, you will always have employees that will take advantage of this, but myself and others that still have a work ethic appreciate being actually paid for our extra time and give our best effort possible.

Now they are discussing transitioning back to salary due to the arrival of a new boss this year. I know if this happens they are going to lose a lot of experienced staff. This might be okay from a business financial perspective. In other words, hire less experienced staff for less pay on salary and it doesn't matter how long it takes. However, in the real world, you're going to upset a lot of clients that way when they're used to things getting done quickly and dedicated (fairly compensated) employees that are willing to work the distance with the customer and actually know what they're doing.

Rambling post aside, yes, OT is a good thing if you want good employees (for the most part).

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[khellendros1984]

but not much to do at home besides watch TV.

There are lots of interesting and/or frustrating problems to work on at home too. If TV's all you can come up with, then you aren't even trying. My work is within a fairly constrained field. I have a lot of ideas for things that I don't have the opportunity to do at work, and when one becomes sufficiently interesting, I find time to write it at home instead.

I go to work to do the things that my employer wants done. I go home and do the things that I want to do. It works out nicely.

um, true

[mrflash818]

: )

Nicely done.

[AnontheDestroyer]

“There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.” -- George Matthew Adams

They wouldn't dare ...

[CaptainDork]

... pay me overtime.

As it is, I make damn sure the system stays out of the ditch so I don't have to come in on my off hours.

Start paying me overtime and I'd be like a goddam wealthy saboteur.

Re:They wouldn't dare ...

[Seraphim_72]

Then hoist the jolly roger and run out the guns and money nets Cap'n - thars GOLD in them thar server cabinets Arrrr!!

Re:The road to hell

[Moof123]

No, you don't "deserve" anything other than what you negotiate

Did you negotiate to have a safe work environment? How about handicap accessibility should you ever end up, even temporarily, in a wheelchair? Id you negotiate a lower salary in trade for not having to endure sexual harassment? Your statement is very naive and immature (read Ayn Rand much do we?).

There is huge value in have the playing field somewhat level for a lot of basic things. Employment is inherently a lopsided arrangement. The employer has a lot more power than you do, so it become necessary to have some bigger entity keep things fair, safe, and liveable. Unions along with state and local government end up balancing the scales.

History is littered with examples of company towns, H1B abuse, child labor, black lung, and many other dark chapters for employees who could choose between whatever the company chose or starving in the street (or worse). Arguing that most employees have almost any meaningful bargaining power is just moronic.

Nobody should be exempt

[msobkow]

Nobody should be exempt from time and a half except the owners of a business. Anyone who works for pay should get paid overtime, if only to punish companies and businesses that insist on overworking their employees instead of hiring more staff to handle the load.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[mark-t]

Hiring more staff to handle the load won't get a job done any faster in certain types of industries, because the work being done is intellectually challenging, and not just physical labour. Hiring more people in such cases introduces a great deal of communication overhead which can rapidly outpace any otherwise expected increase in productivity from having more people working on the job.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[msobkow]

Then adjust the schedule or pay through the nose.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[sdguero]

This doesn't apply in software development. The work isn't "just throw another body at it." It requires thoughtful insight and a nuanced approach to do correctly, and efficiently. An effective software engineer should rarely, if ever, have to work more than 40 hours a week.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[mark-t]

Computer game development.

I've worked for several companies in this industry, and although certainly some are better than others, there's not one of them I've encountered that won't at least occasionally expect you to put in whatever extra unpaid time it takes to get the job completed on schedule. Ideally, such crunch scenarios wouldn't happen, but the reality is that estimating the time it will take to complete certain things is something as complex as a computer game is an art that even highly experienced developers in the industry will frequently flounder in. Some companies are a lot nicer about working overtime than others. The last two I worked for would at least buy the developers dinner to eat while they worked if they stayed past about 7:30 or so.... and people who really burned the midnight oil on a job were almost always given at least one paid day off afterwards.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiring more staff to handle the load won't get a job done any faster in certain types of industries, because the work being done is intellectually challenging, and not just physical labour. Hiring more people in such cases introduces a great deal of communication overhead which can rapidly outpace any otherwise expected increase in productivity from having more people working on the job.

Yep, see "The Mythical Man Month" for more. We have a similar issue where we're behind waiting on another department that is understaffed, but they can't simply hire just more engineers because of the time it takes to interview, hire, familiarize with company procedures and client standards means that by the time new people became useful they would no longer be needed. They do need to hire more people for the long term but there is little that can be done to speed things up in the short term.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it ever occurred to you that project managers are free to underestimate time to produce when they can work their employees extra for free?

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[Shados]

Game development is the worse plague in the industry. Only finance companies come close, and they're not nearly as bad (because they pay up the wazoo. Game development shops do not).

Too many college kids went in with the thought having their name in the credits of the next Final Fantasy or Call of Duty. Supply and demand.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[msobkow]

You're missing the point.

If companies want to compress schedules without being able to increase staffing, then they should be prepared to pay for it.

If they can't justify the cost, then I guess it wasn't that all-fired important in the first place, was it? No, it was just that Billy-Bob-Joe over in Accounting said they "have" to have it by such and such date, but they're not willing to *pay* to have it by that date.

Well, then, it's time for the IT department manager to grow a God-damned spine and tell the customer department "No" instead of expecting the staff to kill themselves for nothing.

And shame on those of you who put up with such crap.

Re:Nobody should be exempt

[mark-t]

Considering there are no shortage of companies that won't even do *THAT* much, yes... that's nice.

And to be fair, the salary as a game developer isn't too shabby.... even after factoring the extra hours worked.

And of course, when the alternative is possible homelessness, nearly anything where you have a steady income is going to look pretty damn attractive.

However, with regards to the pretty much ubiquitous expectation by game studios, regardless of their size, that programmers be willing to work as long as it takes to get the job done without getting paid any more than whatever they had initially agreed to work for as a weekly or monthly salary, one could probably make a reasonable argument that game development may simply be an unhealthy, and possibly even toxic work environment.

You do set your own hours

[SuperKendall]

pretty much presumes that you are an executive-level employee who sets his/her own hours

All coders do in reality, and there are enough job options you can control the flexibility you desire.

You just need to take advantage of the power you have.

Note that although many executives have power to "set hours" they also generally work a LOT of overtime too. I really see them as being similar to coders, more than most people realize.

Re:You do set your own hours

[dbIII]

You are playing that cardboard cutout character again. How about displaying some evidence of thinking about the issue instead of playing this silly game. All coders can set their own hours? You are not that stupid. Please stop acting that way.

Re:You do set your own hours

[dbIII]

So they can walk out at 10am without consequence?
Of course, you seem to suggest, daddy can always find them another job.

Please be serious instead of this stupid little game where you roleplay a reactionary aristocrat.

Re:You do set your own hours

[Maxo-Texas]

Not really.

Coders are expected to perform in a dynamic deadline oriented environment while maintaining a positive, can do attitude.

They need to be self-starters who also comply well with bureaucratic documentation requirements of up to 6-8 signed off documents and meeting schedules of 4-6 meetings before they can do the project.

They need to be good and completing projects in a week doing "what ever it takes" after the executives sat on a project for 6 weeks after the requests were submitted early because "it is what it is."

Re:You do set your own hours

[BonThomme]

Actually, "their position in the market" is exactly the issue at hand.

Re:You do set your own hours

[SuperKendall]

I agree that is some companies - I worked on things like that also.

But there are many, many smaller companies that need programmers where life is nothing like that. The great thing is that a competent programmer really can choose the kind of life that fits them best - some people actually fit in and like the environment you describe, but you can escape if not.

I posted what I did because I want younger developers to ponder the freedom they have and take advantage of it while it exists, and to really take themselves in a direction they want to go.

That's the really hard part though - getting an idea of where you want to go, and sometimes sitting at company for a while until you work that out makes sense.

I'll just leave this here

[babymac]

Those who don't learn their history are doomed to repeat it.

They Deserve It Too

[mx b]

Medical is likely to remain that way because of how hospitals work

Hospitals don't need doctors and nurses pulling insane 24-48 hour shifts (I know they do this because a friend is a nurse), they just do it to save money and not have to hire anyone new. We should let them get overtime and force hospitals to hire more staff and make better shift schedules -- maybe that would help cut down on the crazy wait time just to see your general practitioner, as well as medical mistakes from sleepiness too.

managers pretty much have to have OT on big projects

How about managers (upper management?) learn to make realistic project schedules instead of overworking the employees while they high-five and go to the golf course to celebrate getting a job "done early". Again, let's let managers get paid overtime, and expect employers to make real schedules.. or if they need it to be faster, hire more people before the project starts!

salesmen often work in a manner that makes tracking actual hours of work impractical.

Salesmen often have to travel and I agree that makes it more difficult. However, we can treat it like we would for truck drivers, etc. -- salesmen are allotted x number of hours/days of travel (the travel itself should be considered work, meaning they work 14-16 hour days if we don't include sleep and food), and when they get back, they MUST have mandatory paid time off or they earn overtime on their regular work in the office for the rest of the month. I'm just spouting off an idea here, I'm sure it has some flaws and could be refined, but the point is there is a way to handle odd schedules and still be fair to the employee.

IT could certainly use updated laws. Too many times you have to be on-call, come in on weekends at 3am to fix a server, rush a software project out the door, etc. Same things as above hold -- companies will learn to make better schedules or hire more people if such labor laws are in place. They will bitch about it at first, but they will adapt. There is nothing sacred that makes 60+ hour weekly schedules the only way to do work in these fields.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Hognoxious]

Why should he?

OMG, I's one of then their cormnust's!

Re:The road to hell

[cogeek]

Yes, just ask those money-making auto-workers in Detroit how well that worked out for them. $45 an hour, 2 months paid vacation, retirement, to stand there and push a button all day? And everyone feigned such shock when the companies said "F*$% it, we'll move to Mexico!"

Re:Not true

[Hognoxious]

We hit crunch time roughly quarterly, and the hours sometimes go up a bit then, but the typical load is 40 a day.

If you can't give up, try to switch to low tar. That or refuse the company Tardis.

If I demanded overtime, I'd be unemployed

[mark-t]

Working what usually amounts for myself to no more than a dozen or so extra unpaid hours a week is more than worth being able to still live without resorting to begging on the street.

Re:If I demanded overtime, I'd be unemployed

[anarcobra]

> a dozen or so extra unpaid hours a week
That's more than 2 hours extra per day (assuming standard 5 day work week).
That's pretty bad.

Re:If I demanded overtime, I'd be unemployed

[mark-t]

Pretty bad, perhaps. Being unemployed is worse. Clearly you've never been faced with having to accept a job for less than what you probably fairly deserved for that work or faced being homeless.

Studies show hours worked past 40/wk unproductive

[Paul Fernhout]

So, ultimately, the whole thing is self-defeating in general. Crunch times may be one thing, but on a regular basis, productivity declines even as people look busy.

One example:
http://www.inc.com/jessica-sti...
"The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision....
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers' Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. 'Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,' writes Robinson; 'and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.'
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day."

With software, it is so easy to introduce a bug when you are tired or distracted (one reason team programming often saves money). A bug (especially a conceptual one) might be very expensive to debug down the road, especially if it makes its way to production. How many times have programmers spent days chasing a bug that was a one line fix? So, it may well be the case that longer hours mean *negative* productivity and higher costs for the extra hours worked past 40 per week even when the employee is not paid for the hours.

There is another complicating factor. Big companies in the 1970s such as HP or IBM invested in actually training employees, creating the pool of workers that Silicon Valley drew from initially. Investing in employee training is now rare, due in part due to little loyalty on either side of the employee/employer relationship in many companies. So, given that the tech industry moves so fast, where does the training time come from (including to read Slashdot :-)? Ideally, training should happen during those 40 hours. But in practice, many people working in IT have to keep current on their own time.

Yet training produces many benefits:
http://www.psychologicalscienc...
"A new study from a team of European researchers found that job training may also be a good strategy for companies looking to hire and retain top talent. When workers felt like they had received better job training options, they were also more likely to report a greater sense of commitment to their employer.
For the study, psychological scientists Rita Fontinha, Maria Jose Chambel, and Nele De Cuyper looked at IT outsourcers in Portugal-who must constantly update their skills in order to keep up with the fast pace of new technology. The researchers hypothesized that when people were happy with the training opportunities their employer provided, they would be more motivated to reciprocate with an enhanced sense of loyalty to the company.
This kind of informal balance of expectations between employees and management is known as a "psychological contract." When workers feel that their employer has fulfilled their obligations under the psychological contract, they're more motivated to uphold their

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

I could, but the network access is slower at home.

No

[drolli]

Overtime needs to be paid appropriatly.

If somebody (in my case: simulation experts) do something for me, in want them to be motivated to do a good job every hour they work. If i misplanned the project and they are the only ones who can handle it, it should be on my bill/ the companies bill, not on theirs. I also want them to be not disgruntled and ready for sleeping for 5 weeks because some other PM pushed them the last 6 months to 80h/week, since I need them to have a clear mind.

Unpaid overtime gives wrong incentives, since "too good to be true" Project Management Plans are not pnished, but rewarded.

Am I the only one?

[sdguero]

I have been working as a Software Engineer in Southern California for ~10 years and other than my first job when I was paid hourly, I have never averaged more than 40 hours a week. Sure, once and a while there is a production push and I have to work a 16 hour day, but I take a day off (wihtout using vacation) if that is the case. In general, I work less than 40 hours a week. Over the last year, I'd estimate I average 34 hours/week of actual work and that is split between home and in my cubical. And I'm effective, my maanger is ahppy with my performance and I get good reviews. I am also able to be responsive to my email and even VPN in at times during off hours. I also get to spend a lot of time with my family because I am empowered enough to create my own work schedule. Some of the people I work with spend 50+ hours a week in the office and will respond to emails in the middle of the night. Yet they are less effective than I am. Many of the people I work with ahve siomlar schedules to me, and they are most the upper echelon as far as talent goes. In general, I think engineers who work long hours are inept and are trying to make up for their lack of ability.

Do I think the inept people I work with should get paid more for being at their desks more? No, not really.

Re:Am I the only one?

[sls1j]

Your not the only one. I'm also a software developer that rarely work over 35 hours a week. In fact, even during a push the boss usually sends us home before we'd go home ourselves. He always says that he doesn't want us to do stupid things to the code while were tired.

Re:Am I the only one?

[tjb]

Ditto.

In 15 years as a SW dev at 5 different semiconductor companies (small, medium and ginormous), I've rarely worked more than 35 hours per week and have found that most people who do put in a ton of hours are either (1) serial underperformers who are just trying to keep up with their workload or (2) crazy genius types who are somewhere on the autism spectrum and don't really have lives outside of their work.

Amusingly, in contrast to most of the posts here, my hours have been way shorter and way more flexible working for silicon valley firms than anywhere else. In particular, my brief stint at a German company was where there was the most pressure to put in a ton of hours, even if it meant doing nothing more than sitting in my cube and being present (that place was a nightmare, completely soured me on working for European companies)

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[preaction]

So you should get paid overtime for that. Why would you work for free? Don't you want to live?

Missed a bit - situation bad not poster

[dbIII]

Should be:
(but not much of it for the situation)

The above post comes across as critical to the poster when I'm really trying to be critical of a widespread lazy industry practice.

Lochner v. New York (1905) to Parrish etc. (1937)

[Paul Fernhout]

That is a great historical link, thanks! And that leads to this other on West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, for two Supreme Court decisions that lead up to the Great Depression and then its resolution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington, overturning an earlier decision in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923). The decision is usually regarded as having ended the Lochner era, a period in American legal history during which the Supreme Court tended to invalidate legislation aimed at regulating business.[1]"

Re:The road to hell

[dbIII]

How many people actually agree to working free overtime during negotiations with potential employers?

Just about everyone who gets the job when the market is tight.
Twenty percent unemployment of registered professional engineers where I live and imported guest workers are still allowed due to a "shortage". I've got a job but I'm pissed off that we're losing a generation of people that spent years studying with little to look forward to other than part time jobs making coffee.

2 decades

[jbolden]

I've been preaching this for 2 decades. If everyone were paying overtime we'd have a much better country.

People are stupid

[n0w0rries]

I was salaried working for a big consulting company and they tried to get me to work for free. Sure, I can work Saturday, I'll just take Monday off. They didn't like it, but I didn't care. Take it or leave it. Too many people kowtow, or hey they need to support their large cable tv subscription and payments on their best buy credit card for that new 4K TV they had to have.

Who bought these laws anyway?

[c5402dc53929211e1efb]

Why does my job have to get singled out?

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Artifakt]

If all your itches can be satisfied at work, then you are asexual, since satisfying that one at work will get you fired. By identifying as a person who would gladly spend all their time at work, but not mentioning how statistically unusual you are, you're thus posing a Kantian Universal - That is, you're claiming that what is good for you should be good for everyone. If everyone stops having sex, the human race dies out in a generation. Why do you hate the whole human race?

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[puzzled_decoy]

Go buy a guitar. Broaden your horizons.

So here's an idea ...

[eyegone]

How about we argue for an expansion on non-exempt status based on fairness and logic, rather than dubios macro-economics.

M'kay?

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[easyTree]

So you should get paid overtime for that. Why would you work for free? Don't you want to live?

I think the idea is that one must prostrate oneself before the employer or anyone who might communicate with him to show that their will is sacrosanct and that one will gladly do anything for pay (even accept no pay.)

"I'm not in it for the momey, I do it for the challenge / fun / exposure to new technologies / blah" is an effective large glowing finger hovering in the air, pointing at the perpetrator. Seriously, does anyone think that the employer believes this BS? All it does is serve to hilight that the potential employee is desperate and therefore will take absolutely anything thrown at them as a result of the employer being unable to successfully distinguish between his every personal desire and job-related requirements.

For me, I'm in it for the money - if I want a challenge, I have many ways to generate them for myself; if I want access to the latest technologies, I can download them and setup an environment myself. MONEY! - one of the best modern ways to buy food.

Preemptive update: I suspect such honesty wouldn't work out though; employers really do seem to want zealots who will live revel in their mundane business domain and believe that such people really do exist. N'est-ce pas?

Re:The road to hell

[khallow]

The difference here is that common safe work environments mean less harm to employees and saved lives. Shorter work weeks means more jobs required to make ends meet (assuming one is still employable). It just makes life suck more for a lot of hard working people.

Free work

[manu0601]

A capitalist wants to make money from free work. Even for someone that is not found of Marx, it should be obvious class warfare.

Re:The road to hell

[unimacs]

Yes, unions can and did greedy. That doesn't mean that they aren't valuable.

As more workplaces in the 30's and 40's became unionized, the middle class grew. A public and free high school education was enough to get you a decent job, a good work/life balance and a pension. Not only did that benefit the workers themselves, but those workers had disposable income that they could spend on other products and services, which meant more jobs for other people. These same people could afford to send their kids to college which fueled further innovation.

If an employer needed more production, there was a financial disincentive for them to have their employees work overtime, so they had to hire more people. These people also made a living wage, didn't require welfare, paid taxes, and contributed to the economic vitality of their community.

All in all it worked pretty well for everybody.

But employers are always looking for ways to cut costs and labor is typically a company's biggest expense. So then we got more automation, jobs being outsourced, and union busting. Big companies paying low wages came in to displace smaller ones "to create jobs". But the number of new jobs created is never as many as promised nor do they pay as well. Those jobs that do get created often get moved someplace else or cut altogether when the company merges with another one.

Today, outside of the few union jobs left, it takes specialized education, one you have to pay dearly for, to make a living wage. Graduating college students start out in huge debt and are encouraged to start saving now for their retirement because nobody has pensions anymore and social security is expected to disappear. Hopefully they can get a job that allows them to pay off their student loans before they need to start saving for their kids college education. And hopefully they won't find their job outsourced or outdated by some form of automation before they have saved up enough to retire.

I'm sorry, but I much preferred the outlook for joe and jane six pack when unions were actually relevant. And I'm afraid automation and outsourcing has started whittling away at white collar jobs too. How long before only the most specialized and expensive skills to obtain will be valued enough to pay a living wage for ?

Overtime and Productivity

[mckellar75238]

Most of the comments I see (level 4 or higher) talk about compensation. I come at this from another direction: Productivity.

I generally work hard enough (assuming there is work to do) that if I go over 45 hours a week, I start getting tired, leading to both slowing down and making more mistakes. In general, if I work 50 hours, I produce about the same net worth as if I had worked 40; if I work even more, it just gets worse. Fortunately, I've almost always had bosses who understood this, so it hasn't been an issue. I really feel sorry for those of you who can't say that.

Plutocrats at it again

[Tablizer]

I smell greedy lobbyists

Re:The road to hell

[mi]

Everything is worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it, but they are sure happy to pay a lot less if they can.

You got it, my good man. Just as you are allowed to buy stuff at discount, employers are (or ought to be) allowed to buy your labor at a discount.

So long as every such transaction is voluntary for both sides, there is not a problem.

Decades ago workers figured out that they collectively

Let's not get side-tracked with unions — they really are offtopic.

Re:The road to hell

[mi]

Did you negotiate to have a safe work environment?

I don't have a safe work environment — a variety of assholes have been protesting some thug being killed by a policeman, whom he attacked, all week. Getting in and out of the office was rather unpleasant, but I don't blame my employer for that.

How about handicap accessibility should you ever end up, even temporarily, in a wheelchair?

A valuable employee, such as myself, will be provided with whatever is reasonably needed for him to do his job — whether or not some law requires it or not.

History is littered with examples of company towns

This really has nothing to do with minimum pay. Let's stay on topic.

I see both sides of this issue

[iamacat]

It would tremendously hurt my productivity in current software job if I was not allowed to finish what I am working on after 5, or conversely got my pay cut if I didn't badge in promptly at 9.

But in my previous job, on call rotation was introduced when it was not part of my responsibility before and never mentioned during hiring. It was very unfair to expect someone to have no fully personal time for a whole week, and I switched companies in short order. Overtime pay for any time in office or on call in excess of 8 hours per day would have put a quick end to this situation.

There is a lot of craziness in IT field that needs to be stopped, no matter what the salary is. But I am not sure what kind of law would do that without crippling good employers and engineers.

Re:I see both sides of this issue

[Shados]

The main thing is companies have to be up front about what's expected.

We pay you X, you are expected to Y. This includes A, B and C.

Then its simply a business agreement between 2 people, and the software developer has the long end of the stick.

My issue is companies that don't tell you. Sure, you should ask, but really, it should come up in the employment contract or during salary negotiation. I'm perfectly fine with on-call, I'll just ask an extra 20 grands on my paycheck. Usually most companies are ok with that, and everyone's happy. But there has been a few times when I forgot to ask, and not a peep was made about it from their end. Maybe my fault...but then I end up quitting and everyone gets hurt. I have to explain a short sting on my resume, they have to replace me, everyone's losing out.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Count Fenring]

The only thing you choose to do at home, sure. But "I don't have a life" isn't actually an argument to set social policy by.

Re: Overtime should be illegal.

[mrchaotica]

You missed the second half of his sentence. He wasn't claiming that they didn't die striking; he was claiming that the reason they died striking was fighting for something other than to be allowed to work overtime.

Measuring skill and productivity

[sandGorgons]

It is hard to quantify what should be done in a 40 hour workweek - this is precisely why skilled work is not granted overtime. Usually there are two kinds of skilled labor - one who are very skilled and can get a lot done within a day and others who are not this skilled, but will put in extra time onthe weekends to get the same amount of work done. Both should be paid at par - or else the first category will gravitate towards being the other. this does not apply in highly process oriented or unskilled labor because there is close to zero variance in productivity - think call centres, factory workers, etc.

Re:The road to hell

[dryeo]

Yes, and look how well Mexico is doing with all those good jobs.

Re: Overtime should be illegal.

[DrLang21]

What? I think you replied to the wrong person.

Re:The road to hell

[unimacs]

If you have mouths to feed, bills to pay, and no health insurance, one may be coerced into accepting crappy pay and crappy conditions rather than it being truly voluntary.

Also since you feel that negotiating pay is reasonable system you must also recognize that often in negotiations one side has greater leverage or bargaining power than the other. If I feel that I'm in a weaker position shouldn't I be allowed to strengthen it? And wouldn't that include bargaining collectively rather than as an individual?

I don't know how you can say unions are off topic. It's been shown that unionization both increases the prevalence of premium pay for overtime hours and reduces the extent and incidence of overtime hours.

Re: Overtime should be illegal.

[mrchaotica]

Whoops. I replied to the right person, but I incorrectly thought you replied to the post that said "People didn't die striking so you could work overtime," not the one that was apparently hidden by moderation.

Re:The road to hell

[mi]

If you have mouths to feed, bills to pay, and no health insurance, one may be coerced into accepting crappy pay and crappy conditions rather than it being truly voluntary.

Demagoguery. You could say the same thing about a person selling anything — his house, car, bicycle, anything — not just labor.

Do you want the government to force any would-be buyer to pay a "fair" price for the house, car, or family jewels, etc.? No? What if the seller has no health insurance? How is selling one's labor different?

Also since you feel that negotiating pay is reasonable system

It is the only system. Whatever is being sold, buyer wants to pay less, seller wants to get more — always. They negotiate and either come to some agreement, or walk away. Anything else — such as the government helping one of them against the other — is tyranny and a road to hell....

It is not your employer's fault, that you have "mouths to feed" — they are offering you a certain salary, and you are free to take it or ask for more. The second you think of asking the government to compel the hitherto voluntary party into doing something they don't want to do, you become evil.

If I feel that I'm in a weaker position shouldn't I be allowed to strengthen it? And wouldn't that include bargaining collectively rather than as an individual?

Yes, it is quite possible, that you may be able to convince the would-be buyer, that he can't find a better deal — by agreeing with other would-be sellers to hold a certain price. This still does not change the basic economic principle I put forth — that nothing has an inherent value, and everything is worth exactly as much, as a buyer is willing to pay.

This is why I insist, unions — or any other individual methods of persuasion (legal and otherwise) — are off-topic here.

And for a contrarian view....

[Karlt1]

I like being salaried, I get judged by results and not hours. There have been times that 20 hours worth of work has taken 30 because I was new to the technology, just getting ramped up on code base, wanted to try something new, etc. Would it be fair to get paid time and half because I was learning on the job?

I don't get hours docked if I come in late or leave early because of personal business. I have never gotten push back from a manager if I emailed them and told them I'll be leaving early but I'll make sure I stay on schedule, etc.

There have been days that I knew I wasn't as productive as I should be for a variety of reasons but I would make it up at other times.

So what happens when programmers go hourly? How will our productivity be judged? How will they know we aren't slowing down just to get overtime?

It's always been my experience once I proved myself, that I have the implicit trust of the manager. I give them an honest commitment of how long something will take in hours and they adjust the deadline accordingly. If I underestimate, it's on me to keep my end of the bargain.

If you're in your 20's having to put in 60 hours to get experience and pay your dues so be it. If you're in your 30's and 40's and still putting in 60 hours and you're not getting the pay/equity/bonus to make it worth it -- you're doing it wrong.

Re:And for a contrarian view....

[anarcobra]

This whole expectation that people put in 60 hours without compensation is the problem in the first place.
So is the "you haven't managed to negotiate a better deal? sucks to be you" attitude.

Re: And for a contrarian view....

[Karlt1]

I have worked in the industry for almost 20 years and it has never taken me more than a month to find a job paying more than what I was making. If you are a halfway competent developer with a modicum of interview skills and a decent network of friends and recruiters in the industry, it's not really that difficult to negotiate a fair compensation based on the workload. I have never had to work consistently more than 40 hour wotk weeks because of unrealistic deadlines. I expect to work longer with a new (to me) technology or an unfamiliary code base.

If their is a project with tight deadlines that I successfully implemented and had to work extra, I am going to definitely at least ask for comp time even if they are not in a position to compensate me financially.

If you are an experienced developer and working 60 hours a week and not getting compensated for it and are not able to find another job, it is completely your fault. People who I have seen stuck at a job they didn't like either didn't keep up with technology or didn't develop the soft skills required to make their accomplishments known or to network themselves to a better job.

Wow

[KramberryKoncerto]

Billionaire capitalist talking some sense because he understands the tragedy of the commons? That's ... surreal.

Gini Coefficient well proven

[Martin S.]

I find it surprising that many ardent self identified capitalist have such a poor grasp of economics. They object to economic equality despite the fact the Gini Coefficient is well proven and demonstrates that increasing economic equality promotes increased economic growth and supports a larger over all GDP.

Why?

[lapm]

Why should they be exempt? That would mean less jobs for professionals since companies would abuse situation... Some smucks would surely be stupid enough to sign contract that says overtime is not compensated...

Yes!!! Please don't pay me overtime!!!!

[johnlcallaway]

I like the flexibility I have to work the hours I choose to. I get paid to do a job, no matter what the hours. I would much rather get comp time than paid overtime, and my company is pretty flexible.

And for those calling for unionization, take a look around you. How many 'union' companies are left?? The textile industry, steel industry, and many others are all GONE after unions raised wages so high it became cheaper to build factories overseas. Many successful car companies have tossed unions aside, and were better able to handle the economic downturn that GM and Chrysler. Remember many years ago when everyone started outsourcing?? The main reason was high wages.

I've been paid overtime a couple of times in my career. And it sucked. Because I got sucked into the overtime trap, and worked more hours to get more pay. Then, when overtime was not allowed, I was stuck on the short end of a paycheck because I had gotten used to it.

I'd rather work smarter, and work fewer hours, than work longer hours and have less free time.

Just because some have a sucky job and can't find a better one because they have average skills, don't penalize those that have great jobs.

Re:Yes!!! Please don't pay me overtime!!!!

[anarcobra]

The point of overtime pay isn't to get payed more.
It's to encourage your employer to hire more people rather than overwork you.
The fact that you misunderstood this and used overtime to get more pay doesn't mean that overtime is bad.
Without overtime your employer will just make you work more without paying you more.
And I'm sure if you don't want overtime pay you can negotiate with your employe about it.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[knightghost]

so why not stay at work and get stuff done?

At work I'm productive for the employer but don't expand my skills. At home I work for ME - putting investment into expanding my skills which helps both me and my employer in the long run.

Salary = Wage Slave. The entire concept of a salary was for people that owned a chunk of the business. 99% of people should be hourly.

Good IT = Engineering, not art. Taking 12 hours to do 1 hour of work is due to lack of education and experience, not flexibility.

Re: I have nothing better to do...

[BonThomme]

In learning guitar, or anything orthogonal to your wheelhouse, you will use parts of your brain that are atrophying, and get smarter at everything in the process. The don't call them renaissance men for nothing. Specialization is for insects.

Re:Not true

[BonThomme]

lol, 40 a day?

typical != average, btw

Re:That reminds me, you know who doesn't do overti

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Exactly, rest is part of their training. (And if you're a knowledge worker not getting your rest makes you significantly less intelligent.)

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Smallpond]

Jesus, if I ever look at my life and think I have nothing better to do than be in work then I'm jumping off a cliff.

You need to try base jumping.

Might change the choice of platforms

[RogueWarrior65]

From my own experience in a mixed Windows PC/Macintosh corporate environment, the computer-to-IT staff ratio for PCs was 10:1, meaning that one IT person could handle maintaining 10 PC users. On the Mac side of things, the ratio was closer to 100:1. Given that, if IT staff can suddenly demand overtime pay, corporate is going to find a way to reduce the costs which translates to less-demanding platforms.

Re:Might change the choice of platforms

[Shados]

10 to 1 ratio for mixed environment? Thats insane. There was some incompetence in there somewhere. 100:1 sounds about right, but ratio obviously gets better as you scale up (once you have tens of thousands, you only need a few to handle the centralized stuff, and 1-2 per physical office for hardware related issues).

Re:Might change the choice of platforms

[ledow]

It's closer to 100:1 almost everywhere I've worked.

Sorry, but if it's not 100:1, I think you're doing something VERY wrong, probably including not training your staff (IT or otherwise) at all.

And, to be honest, Mac support isn't in the same class. Macs are individual machines that, to centrally manage, is more difficult than it needs to be. Enforcing security policy on any serious basis requires an awful lot more work.

But let's not get into Mac vs Windows, as they are pretty similar if you use them en-masse. Let's focus that you think you need one guy to manage a small room of 10 users, and the same next door, and the same next door, and the same next door.

Fuck that. I've seen schools with 1000's of users with IT teams of anywhere from 2 to 7.

Re:Might change the choice of platforms

[RogueWarrior65]

Insane, yes, but this was the type of corporate environment where, as a VP, head-count was a status symbol and meant you could command a bigger budget. Of course, this was also an environment that took lessons from the Fairchild Semiconductor school of rank-has-it's-privileges which often meant that higher rank garnered you better furniture and a better computer. Stupid. I once got yelled at by a petty office manager for swapping a product manager's computer with one of that manager's graphic artists at his request so the artist could do their work.

Re:Might change the choice of platforms

[Shados]

Fair, but then it has nothing to do with the platform. Windows has a lot of flaws, but requiring a lot of IT people to maintain a large number of them is not one of them. Domain policies, centralized app deployment and management out of the box and all the features you'd expect have been in for a very long time and work very well. Its one of its strengths, not weakness.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[JWW]

Exactly. This idea has infected the entire modern American business world.

I work as a contractor for the government, I am required to post my time which is used for billing.

On the hard face of it all, I am not "allowed" to work more than 40 hours, I certainly won't be paid for them, and my company can't ever invoice for them, without prior agreement from the customer.

However, whenever we interview people to come in and work here, certain folks on the interview committee pretty much require the applicant to genuflect to the common "whatever it takes to get the job done" belief that over 40 hours is no big deal and that they do that "all" the time. Even though that is technically completely against the rules for contracting.

They should not be exempt

[mysidia]

But for IT; overtime should be defined differently from number of hours worked.

What about On-call time or "Standby for call, but sleeping" time?

I believe either On-Call time should be required to be included in hours worked first, or employers should be required to define a consistent workday for employees, such as 9 am to 5pm; they must define a standard 40 hour work schedule.

And any work out of the defined work schedule is overtime. Even if there are less than 40 hours total.

Re:That reminds me, you know who doesn't do overti

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Exactly right. I like to bring it up because in order to get in the Olympics you need to be really good and have every little edge you can get.(To get the most out of their training they've realized they need to consider rest as part of that.) Even in this extreme scenario overtime is counter productive for exactly the reasons you mention. (Which leads me to think in less extreme scenarios, such as IT professionals just doing their job, overtime probably doesn't work either. From what I know everybody who's studied the end result of overtime on workers finds that you don't actually get more work but you do get pissed off employees.)

How the Economy Works

[sudon't]

In the exact same way that the erosion of the federal minimum wage—from an inflation-adjusted peak of about $11 an hour in 1968 to only $7.25 an hour today—has held down wages for low-income Americans, the simultaneous erosion of the overtime threshold has also held down wages for the American middle class. And just like raising the minimum wage would nudge up incomes for those workers earning somewhat above it, restoring the overtime threshold would push up incomes for many workers currently earning above $69,000 too.

You know, I always suspected that these people really understood how the economy worked, and that they were simply bamboozling voters into thinking that giving more money to the rich would benefit working people somehow. That's not how the economy works. It works by consumer demand. And if the consumer has no money, there is no demand.

So, here we have it, straight from the horses mouth. You can stop voting against your own interests now.

"land of the free"

[jdawgnoonan]

Kind of funny that in this great "Land of the Free" companies are prioritized over people. Must be that American Dream everyone likes to fantasize about, or some other American myth. This is a great country but we seem to be addicted to lying to ourselves here.

What is Hanauer doing?

[ksheff]

Does he require his employees to be paid overtime? Is he leading by example or just rattling on about the government should force other people to do?

Re: I have nothing better to do...

[ksheff]

Don't worry. You will be middle aged one day.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Pubstar]

I had this problem with a previous employer. Its a double edge sword. I was working on a refresh project at a major bank, and I was told several times "This is your work load, you get this done every day, we do not pay overtime." I managed to automate most of my work load which lead to four hour days. If they refuse to pay me the OT I had to work when I was first getting accustomed to the systems and treat me like Im salary, I believe I had the right to get my work load done for the day and go home.

My favorite one

[kilodelta]

I'm an actual I.T. Pro - Linux mostly. That said when I worked for the state our benefits sort of paralleled the union employees. But when it came to overtime we didn't get that - instead we got to comp hours. When we relocated offices I ended up with 400 comp hours. And I exercised them, roughly 10.6 weeks worth. A day off here, a week off there. Took close to two and a half years to tap that out. It resulted in me not working my last month there and being paid for it so that was cool.

Re:The actual problem is this...

[ledow]

I wouldn't want your life.

After 15 years in IT, including self-employment and employment, state and private, and I haven't worked an hour of overtime unnecessarily. If something blows up, yeah, I'll hang around to get it working for the next morning - but I'll make sure I'm paid for it or get it off in lieu. Apart from that, I'm not a clock-watcher but will certainly work as my contract states.

And the line "other reasonable duties" is a joint interpretation. If I don't think it's reasonable, I won't be doing it. Never had a problem, never had to argue or even discuss it with an employer.

Overtime is OVER time. It's a voluntary, temporary extension of your contract which is paid extra to compensate for the short-notice and unusual nature of the change. If you're doing that to win favour, you're an idiot. Find a better place to work, where they would be horrified at you trying to work overtime and tell you to go home unless there was a REAL need for you to do so.

Most employers that I've worked for, my boss will sneak out of the door 15-30 minutes before he should and, as he passes, tells you to go home yourself. Especially if it's a Friday.

Is this an American thing? Quite who do you think you're benefitting by working uncompensated as a matter of course?

Computer Professionals are NOT computer users.

[servant]

Painting everyone that uses computers as computer professionals, is like saying that everyone that can provide healthcare is a doctor, from mom's with sick kids, secretaries that keep asprin in their desk, MRI operators, etc, including the 'health care professionals' from pharmacists, researchers, doctors, janitors in healthcare facilities, nurses, 'real' doctors, etc.

.

Time to go back to the drawing board to define what the term means, not just what is convenient.

Otherwise a 'computer professional' is asking you if you want fries and a malt with that burger just because they press a key on a 'data entry device'.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[Bengie]

I was under the impression that more recently, salary job is more of a "service" oriented job where output cannot be counted easily, but is critical for the business. You can pay someone hourly and expect X number of stuff to be done, or you can pay someone to stand guard and pay them for how many hours they are watching something, but then it comes to paying someone for their creativity, that cannot be measured.

Much of the work I do is very subjective in its value. I don't so much get told what to do as "here's a problem, solve it". There are many says to "solve" the problem, and there are many ways to implement the solution, both aspects are very important.

Decisions I make now about one project can dramatically affect other future projects. Most of my time at work involves thinking, very little doing, and I can't be constantly thinking, so I need a lot of down time. I have no idea how someone would put an "hourly value" on that.

Someone could see me browsing the internet for an hour, are they going to say "he wasn't working! why are we paying him?". That was my mental down time. The concept of getting paid for hourly work breaks down when you can no longer tell if someone is working at any given moment.

Re:The road to hell

[Bengie]

I've seen pensions claim bankruptcy and everyone who depended on it lost it all. At least when I have a 401k with a financial institution that is 130 years old and a track records of excellence and ethics, I am less concerned about it randomly folding. Even if my company didn't use this institution, I could transfer my 401k funds to them. Can't do that with a pension.

Re:The road to hell

[Bengie]

You could say the same thing about a person selling anything — his house, car, bicycle, anything — not just labor.

Selling is the transfer of wealth, labor is the creation of value. Big difference.

Re:Salaried positions only make sense in a few cas

[David_W]

Another option for those few rare cases would be to allow yearly averaging and only require paying overtime if the average for the year is over 40. That would make for a nice christmas bonus.

Interesting concept, however I'd tweak it in two ways: 1. You would probably want to do it on a rolling year basis (i.e., annually on your hire date) to smooth out the cash outflow a bit, and 2. Make it mandatory to do when someone leaves as a YTD calcluation. I've seen enough places that want to cheat you out of a bonus because you left/were laid off a couple weeks before the payout day, even though the work you did to earn that bonus was already done over the last weeks/months/year.

Vote yes

[davydagger]

Americans spend the most time at work, and get the least done in the hours they are at work.

We need to mandate the 40 hour week again.

Before anyone says "but muh business", business worked just fine before regulations were laxed. The resulting "growth" after undoing regulations has done nothing but drive the wage gap between the top and the bottom.

Re:The road to hell

[mi]

Selling is the transfer of wealth

No, it is not, actually. Not even close...

labor is the creation of value.

First of all, labor, however heavy, does not automatically mean value. A man can spend 4 hours digging a hole, and 4 more hours filling it up. At the end of the 8 hours he is very tired, his hands are callused, but his hard labors produced no value whatsoever.

On the other hand, an old cell-phone charger may be of no use to me, but to a buyer — who still uses that peculiar cell-phone — it may be very valuable. My sale of the charger to him has just created value...

Big difference.

Distinction — maybe. But distinction without difference. Because any argument, with which you can come up to justify government intervention on behalf of a seller of labor, can also be applied to sellers of iPhones and orange juice...

Re:Studies show hours worked past 40/wk unproducti

[rustl]

For the study, psychological scientists

You had me until this point!

Re:The road to hell

[BonThomme]

That's actually quite funny. I'd mod you up if I could.

Re:Salaried positions only make sense in a few cas

[Wycliffe]

Yeah, I agree. It would definitely have to be based on the number of weeks worked or some
other calculation. It would be easy enough to come up with some rules and then maybe
tweak them a bit to prevent abuse. One possible problem would be construction workers
that only work 9 months out of the year so they could be worked half to death for those 9
but they get overtime and still work that way anyways.
I think the main point is that they should allow employer/employee flexibility with compliance
but crack down on obvious abuse. There *might* be a few occupations where it's difficult to
track hours and you might have to use estimates or other ways to calculate it but for the most
part just like other employee protection laws we should make an effort that they are effective
and aren't circumvented. Currently overtime laws are constantly being abused or subverted
to the point where overtime protection is almost non-existent for whole groups of people.

Art of Engineering

[NewYork]

If programming is ART it's YES.
If programming is ENGINEERING it's NO.

IT pros absolutely *should* get overtime pay

[sydbarrett74]

In fact, only people at the very top of the income distribution should be exempt from overtime pay -- think A-list actors and professional athletes. The vast majority of workers should be paid overtime. *cue bullshit libertarian arguments about how this abrogates free-market capitalism*

Re:The road to hell

[Bengie]

Well, if you're going to argue corner cases, then sure, you're 100% correct a whole 20% of the time. I assume the 80/20 rule is a play when comparing the transfer of wealth "creating value" vs labor creating value.

But if you were to compare two hypothetical worlds
1) where no one labored, so nothing was created, but could sell all of that nothing
or
2) where no one could sell anything, but everyone could labor to create stuff. I did say, not sell stuff, so they could just take stuff and start using it.

Which world would have more "value"? The world full of nothing or the world full of stuff but no market with which to sell? An extreme example to show the fundamental difference.

To labor to create something where there is no demand or the supply outpaces the demand is purely wasted effort, but that doesn't happen as often as people creating stuff that is in demand. Artificial demand is dangerous. Behold, the power of market bubbles!

You're not paying? I'm not working.

[deskjethp]

Even if you are, I won't work > 40 anyway, unless the pay is extreme.

it is still cheaper to pay overtime

[johncandale]

In general it will still be cheaper to pay overtime than hire more workers. Especially in areas where overtime only comes during certain times of the year. It is still a good thing thou because we don't need to pity-the-poor-billionaires and a little wealth adjustment is fine, it will also help the economy as a whole by making more people have the ability to spend more.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[torkus]

However, whenever we interview people to come in and work here, certain folks on the interview committee pretty much require the applicant to genuflect to the common "whatever it takes to get the job done" belief that over 40 hours is no big deal and that they do that "all" the time. Even though that is technically completely against the rules for contracting.

Not only against the rules, but it's against the law. There's quite a bit of employment law and case law that most companies basically ignore outright in the US. Example: if your hired as an exempt employee (not OT) for 40 hour weeks but are routinely scheduled/work more than that to the point it becomes your normal work then you're entitled to compensation (I think at OT rates) for it. Exempt is intended to cover occasional extra time - not mandatory extended hours every week.

However very people sue over it due to various (likely illegal) terms in employment agreements, severance packages, etc.

Annoyed at being a perma-temp or long term consultant alongside people getting paid more, bonuses, vacation, and benefits that you don't get? Google co-employment laws. You probably could sue (or threaten to sue) and win all the back benefits you didn't get. But you're also a consultant and your position would be gone the first hint that you might even know those rights exist.

Welcome to abusive corporate america where the shareholder and stock price is far, FAR more important than doing what's legal or moral.

Re:I have nothing better to do...

[torkus]

The entire concept of a salary was for people that owned a chunk of the business. 99% of people should be hourly.

Mostly agreed. It's also for individuals who have a direct link between success and compensation. What used to be managers with large stock portfolios and bonuses tied to performance...who also had the ability to set their own schedule. Basically people who it makes more financial sense to take compensation besides hourly pay and overtime.

Then they started including geeks in this somehow. If you manage, develop, design or implement 'computer systems' you're typically in the bucket for exemption. That rule stands apart from the others - ability to commit the company in substantive financial matters, high level business decisions, managing staff or a budget.

Hyberbole

[nicoleb_x]

Wow! You go from quoting studies to pure hyperbole and expect us to accept them both without hesitation. When you argue with "might", "maybe" and "may well be" you're just making it up.