Slashdot Mirror
High Tech Wages - Salary or Hourly?
cremes asks: "I'm a technology manager (not a PHB) at a Financial Services firm, and I've recently bumped my head against another dreaded management issue. Most of my employees are salaried with a rather weak "overtime" compensation package. I've asked them if they want to go hourly, but there is resistance. I promised them I would Ask Slashdot what the country & world are doing about high tech wages and the feelings about flat salary versus hourly (+ time and a half). So, how are most of you paid? Salary or by the hour?" We've discussed the amount that you think is fair compensation for this industry, so it's only fitting we talk about how that amount should be earned.
I work for an IT consultancy firm in The Netherlands and I get paid a salary. It is the most common in The Netherlands. I prefer salary over an hourly rate because it gives me more security (when you're sick or when the firm has no assignments, you get paid.)
As a systems engineer, I was on salary. (Got laid off 2 days ago, everyone else is hiring except Ikon and they're laying people off. Go figure.) Minimal overtime though, and if there was any it was usually compensated by time off or applied towards your monthly hours billed. My company kept track of hours billed and paid a $100 bonus for every 10 hrs over 120/month billed.
p.s. I fucking hate first post idiots, especially when they have nothing to say.
From your short description, it sounds like the weak overtime is not really a problem for your co-workers - if it were, they'd probably jump at your suggestion. Is it a problem that they are not eager enough to put in extra hours to get the job done? Is that your problem? Because if it is, you need to look at working conditions other than pay - find a way to make folks care about the project, care enough to be proud when a milestone is reached, and when you've reached that state they'll be more than happy to discuss perks like the amount of overtime pay. If the work is uninteresting, the amount of overtime pay is irrelevant, folks will leave at five no matter what.
:-)
Of course, I'm over-simplyfying, but you really didn't give me much background to work with
-John
While it has a few drawbacks, I like being salary. If anybody asked me to punch a clock, or fill in a timesheet, I'd quit that job immediately. I'm salaried with NO bonus for overtime except for the fact that I'm very well compensated to begin with, given my workload and such.
I like getting the same amount in my paycheck. I like the comfortable feeling knowing that 'if i work 30 hours for 2 weeks after putting in 4 70 hour weeks, it won't hurt my paycheck.'
Honestly, if you put me on hourly, I'd put my resume out to a recruiter, even if it were equivalent. Hourly pay feels very temporary.
As a tech for a small IT consultancy firm/ISP, I have seen several of my co-workers be gyped out of money by being put on salary. I am an hourly employee who works sometimes 25 hours in a week and sometimes 60. In the past 2 years, I have worked enough overtime to put my total annual pay at a higher dollar amount than my salaried counterparts. They do the same amount of work--if not more--that I do, yet they make less money for it. Doesn't seem fair to me...
I work for a local computer store and get paid hourly, either for work on site at the shop, or for work off site, working on networks and hardware installations.
;o)
Much easier this way - just count up at the end of the day!
---- Robert Anton Wilson: "Belief is the death of intelligence."
Tech people prefer two things in a job.
RULE #1. It's fun
RULE #2. It pays well
Now how does this apply to hourly/salry wages?
From RULE #1 we know that timecards are bad because we don't like to fill them out. It is a nucience and why should our employer care if I took a two hour break to play Quake3 Test?
From Rule #2 we know that people on salary who don't get overtime pay get really razzed.
Solution:
if salary
then hourly
if hourly
then salary
or
Just give them a salary, and a bonus if they are clearly working hours above and beyond 40hrs a week. Duh.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
In every salaried job I have had, my contract of employment said I was to work 40hrs/week, with occasional unpaid overtime. Now, you people who work in IT (i.e. pretty much every slashdotter?). When was the last time you worked a 40 hour week?
Just to remind you, that would mean, say, coming into work at 9am and leaving at 5:30pm (allowing a half hour for lunch), five days a week. Have you *ever* done that? Isn't something like 10am - 8 or 9pm a more familiar pattern?
Of course, you could insist on just working the hours stated in your contract. But you might like to keep your job instead. So you just go with the flow, and live with the situation. You abandon your social life and turn in 50hr+ weeks - for nothing extra. Is your time really worth nothing?.
I like being paid by the hour. If I work a 12-hour day (common enough) then I get paid for 12 hours. If I have to come in on the weekend, that goes down on my timesheet too - so I welcome overtime rather than resenting it.
Being salaried should not always proclude getting overtime pay. It is pretty easy to figure out your hourly rate and how much you should be compensated for overtime. Convincing your employer that you should be paid that ammount is another matter. On a work term of mine there was much overtime needed to get the job done. We worked 80hrs or more a week. The manager authorized overtime and both salaried and hourly paid were compensated with time and a half. However the salaried worked the first 4 hours "free." In this situation the overtime was a rare occurance and lasted about 4-5 weeks. Once the job was done, we went back to our 40hrs weeks.
If you find that you and your team are continually working 50-60hrs weeks when you signed on for 40hrs then your employer needs to do something. Either hire more people or raise your salary. If it is significant ammounts of occasional overtime then maybe your employer should pay you for it, or give you an equal ammount of time off instead. The time off deal seems quite common among my friends.
Myself I am salaried and wouldn't have it any other way for reasons given by other posters.
Although it's perhaps not unexpected that permanent employees see money as the principal advantage of working freelance, that really misses the point entirely.
Contractor rates are higher only as a side effect of the main advantage, which is that you are independent and you negociate as a peer with customers and with agencies. This does translate into higher rates of earning, yes, but it has a much more important effect than just that. You're free, free of the corporate politics, free of the need to take crap just to stay on the career ladder, free to speak your mind as an independent computer professional rather than being just a cog in a machine. If you're good then technical management appreciates you regardless of whether you're permanent or contractor of course, but that's not true of PHBs and top management; they don't appreciate techies at all, so don't feel any qualms in making them pay decent market rates for their lack of appreciation that it's technology that underpins their business. Quite possibly they'll appreciate you more when you stand out on their spreadsheet.
I'd recommend it to anyone that knows his or her stuff. Far from lacking in job security as permanent staff would have you believe, it is an extraordinarily secure form of employment in the current burgeoning Internet environment where skills are the main bottleneck to corporate expansion online, as long as you site yourself within commuting distance of one of the corridors of activity. You'll never look back.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
In general though, I have noticed that working on an hourly basis tends to make me feel more temporary. I am part-time and all only working like 10-20 hours a week, so hourly definitely makes sense. But that fscking time-clock is annoying, especially the one I use. It won't let you punch in early and won't let you leave late. It used to be open for computer techs (which I am) but they put us on stricter scheduling now.
Anyway though... When doing freelance computer work (or anything like this, even plumbers, electricians and all that) it's usually better to get an idea of how much it is going to cost you to do certain jobs and charge by the job. People are really reluctant to give up $60/hr for "General computer labor" (which is actually a good price) but a "Well, I can install that hard-drive for $50.00" usually makes it easier to swallow. Incidently, that is how Best Buy (where I work) prices computer labor.
Anyway, I'd much rather get paid a salary and have a set of tasks to do than get paid hourly and treated like a grunt helper. Of course since I am a full-time student and this is part time work, hourly is about the only thing that makes sense.
Remember that though, hourly makes you feel like you are temporary, or part-time, or a grunt. Those are not the kind of feelings you want your workers to have. But I can't say that working hourly is bad, it is definitely the right solution for a company like Best Buy.
Just my $.02
It is not until you mentioned it that I remember how much I despised watching the clock when I was paid hourly. Timesheets will always be annoying, but watching the clock sucked. I dosen't help when the manager feels that every minute must be spent "producing."
Now I am salaried. I go to work, get the job(s) done and on time. Some weeks I work late, others I go home early. No one really cares how many hours I work as long as I do my work. I still ask for overtime hours if needed (long projects with little time), but I don't mind occasionly putting in a few hours unclaimed. I often do work late if the project is interesting.
If you want to give your workers a reason to stick around after hours then reward them for getting the job done quickly and well, not for being there.
There nothing like the little benefits to keep workers happy and productive. This includes recognition for a job well done.
As an addendum to the above, contracting implies hourly accounting, since that's the norm for freelance employment in the computer industry (maybe in all industries?).
Since we do outrageous hours (90 hours per week is not unusual for permanent and contract staff alike), the double benefit of higher and hourly rates should be obvious. Just keep your Palm Pilot with you, press IN/OUT when relevant, and at the end of the week you pop out a pretty timesheet. No hassle, and there's the added benefit that if management is tight with money and misguidedly pushes only permanent staff to work extra hours then you have more time to pursue your own interests. Hourly remuneration carries the huge advantage of making people at the top appreciate the work you do in the only way they understand.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I'm on salary, and although my contract actually does say something about OT compensation, my bosses told me rather bluntly before I took the position that they don't pay OT.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, my situation is easily exploited. OT gives your project managers an incentive to plan projects rationally and well, so you're less likely to end up with a week of all-nighters just before the deadline. And I sure have had weeks like that. Those are the days that you're certain you don't get paid enough.
On the other hand, the salary is pretty good and takes OT into account (although I suspect that an hourly wage would turn out better during those murder weeks). And after the deadline has passed and the crunch is over, I can always take some time off. The bosses have always known what was going on and were more than happy to let me rest up. And I would hate a timeclock. I was rented out for a year to a company where I had to punch in and out, and it taught to just Not Give a Damn about what wasn't finished at quittin' time.
I think a lot of us programmers have to admit that we don't pull those all-nighters just for the money we're making. As much as I hate them, I just don't want a project I'm working on to fail, and feel that it will reflect on me even if the problem was caused by someone else's poor planning. (*I* know that, but outsiders, including the customer, might not.)
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
In the UK the rule seems to be that (simplifying somewhat) you pay employees salaries and contractors hourly.
I guess it depends on what you want. Simplifying again: Mercenaries who are there for the money, the money, and only the money, or employees who come in to work for the money, the social environment and the interesting challenges that you provide.
Don't get me wrong! There is nothing wrong with contractors. I was one, once, and I am employing contractors at this very moment. Very useful and probably, in many cases, a more honest approach to work.
I guess I'm trying to say more or less the same as this insightful post (hint to moderators!) who suggests that you need to look carefully at why you, as the employer, want to change the way the renumeration is calculated. It sounds to me like you are trying to some some other problem. Are the employees not putting in the hours? The commitment? Not delivering quality? Then the problem is likely to be you, the manager, rather than the way you calculate the money. Look carefully at your working environment, and check the three points I mentioned above:
Of these it sounds like you have the first one sorted out: your employees do not seem to have a problem with the amount of money, just with the way you want to calculate it.
The second point includes you, the manager, and the environment at large. How are you to work with/for? Is there a good working environment? Are people rewarded and recognised fairly and openly according to well-known expectations? Are you running a sweat-shop? You have to ask yourself these difficult questions.
The last one is hopefully self-explanatory. It is very hard to get people to be enthusiastic about mind-numbing work.
I hope some of these thoughts help. Good luck to you and to your employees!! (Sounds like you are going to need it.)
Hi!
The thing that can make salary a pain is when management starts to view your marginal cost as zero. In other words, they can heap as much work on you as they like, and it costs nothing extra. This is an obstacle to efficient management. Too often, they'll have you work on some old hardware that could be cheaply replaced, but to their eyes, you can fix it for free. You end up maintaining things that aren't worth maintaining. In the short run, they save some cash, but it inevitably means that something else gets dropped or delayed, and it's lousy for marale. But many PHB's think they're smart because it looks like they're getting something for nothing.
Hourly with a guaranteed minimum has always provided the proper incentives and delivered the best results, both for me and for the employers.
I'm on a salary, and wouldn't have it any other way. As it is, I can spend an afternoon, say, with a book on my lap, boning up on a subject which is only borderline relevant to my job. A current example is XML, which may become an important part of my area in the next 6 months, but at present is nothing to do with our current project.
It's work, and I deserve to get paid for it, but I can't see it going down very well in an "hourly pay" environment.
The culture here is "you have these jobs to do, and these nominal hours to do them in. You may browse the web all day and get the work done at night if you prefer it that way, but don't expect overtime. You may work your arse off for a short day, then go home at 4:30 if you prefer, as long as the work gets done." (oh, and we're expected to maintain core hours of 10:30-4:30; whether we work the remaining hours before 10:30 or after 4:30 is our decision.)
... if a customer problem comes up which involves working out of ours, *then* we get compensated with pro rata overtime.
--
Let's calculate that out. Let's start with a (low) salary of $30160, and the matching hourly wage of $14.50/hr.
:)
Salaried:
6 weeks salaried == $3480
Hourly:
(30*14.5)2 + ((40*14.5) + (30*21.75))4 == $5800
Stretch that out to yearly averages:
Salaried == $30160 (DUH
Hourly == $50266.67 (apprx.)
Now tell me again, which hurt your paycheck more? I guess it depends on spending habits. I say learn self control, and don't overspend in the weeks you bring home more. The advantages are (for me, this may not apply to you) cushion if there are lean periods, but since there are few (or were, I should say -- I work for myself now) that leaves surplus to A)pay off debt, or B)invest. When you take into account the effect of compound interest (on the debt OR the investment) the gap between salaried and hourly becomes even greater.
Personally I am starting to get quite burned out on the notion that I work for some company or that a company somehow owns my talent or works. Unless of course the company is my own. I used to think that being "on the inside" gave more insight into the overall strategy and planning of the future and more control over whether success or failure ultimately ensued. Now I no longer believe that. I've seen too many companies with broken internal communication, lack of any real design or planning, and even very senior people feeling powerless to change much or even to have their input heard. To me, it is these things that are most important, especially in a fulltime regular employee situation. Empower your people, involve them, challenge them and regularly reward them. Whether they get time and a half for overtime is pretty irrelevant. I can get time and a half at McDonalds.
I don't recall exactly where I read this information, but IIRC:
...unless you work in data processing/information systems.
- Professionals are defined as people like lawyers and doctors. They aren't supposed to be paid overtime.
- Everyone else *IS* supposed to be paid overtime...
-
Some lobbying group got the US Congress to set up the laws to allow salaried IS/DP people to work overtime but not require them to be compensated for that work.
In any case, most employers don't want to pay overtime anyway.
In my own life, I just came out of a firm where I was working 50-60 hour weeks for the first three months of the job. "Comp time" wasn't intended to be used more than a week or two past the original overtime, and there was no way that I was going to be getting paid extra. I managed to salvage the project but there was no recognition of that fact, nor was there any increase in pay or compensation. This convinced me that if you're salaried, you have less incentive to actually do the work after a point--I'd get paid the same amount when I came in at 10am and left at 3:30pm as when I was coming in at 7am and leaving at 6pm.
I'm glad that I chose consulting and contracting. The firm I work for pays my W2, they let me bill hourly, and I get vacation. I also am compensated well enough that I could get by with less hours worked, but I get incentives for billing over 40. And the benefits are better than most of the traditional salaried positions would offer.
All in all, I think it's more fair to the employees and clients to only bill for hours worked. A salaried position is like a fixed price contract where you know how much money is coming, and if you work more or less hours, it doesn't make any difference. That's not a good contract for myself or my clients. I would much rather be fair to them and myself by billing for work done and only billing for doing nothing when I'm on the client's premisis, waiting for things to blow up or looking for things to fix.
Chris
I'm assuming that you're proposing converting their existing salary directly to the equivalent hourly rate for a standard 8-hour day. If so, the only benefits of being paid one way of the other are when it comes to overtime. In my experience, unpaid overtime (as is common for salaried workers here in the UK) sucks. It becomes expected, and you end up having to work longer and longer hours for no pay. That really starts affecting staff morale, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a techie department. So basically, what I'm saying is, pay for overtime, for both salaried and hourly paid workers. Also, overtime should be treated as something extra -- your staff are doing you a favour by working over and above their normal hours, and should be paid accordingly. Jobs that pay overtime at the normal hourly rate similarly affect morale. Time and a half won't cost you that much extra, and it'll do wonders for morale.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I work as a "contractor" according to UK practice. Hourly paid freelance, but hired out on 3 month+ terms for fairly static contracts. If I wourk 41 hours, I typically bill it as the agreed 40, because there's management pressure not to have worked the extra hour in the first place. If I work 50-60 hours for weeks at a time, I bill it and get rich and exhausted.
Do I care between salary and hourly ? Not a bit of it -- I care far more about the other issues; the staff management culture, the project management culture, the nerd interest in the work and the quality of the office coffee. I often have great difficulty in finding my next contract; it's easy enough to find "a contract" and it's pretty easy to find the best paid contract (because that's all that the agencies see as significant). It's much, much harder to find a contract I'll be happy with; one that has a good atmosphere and interesting technical aspects.
As for security, salaries aren't secure anyway (these days). My security comes from a month's living expenses in the bank and a skillset that I keep up to date. I've worked in plenty of offices where the employed staff expressed horror at my "insecurity", then have found themselves downsized a month later.
If it's occasional overtime and an average 40 hour work week, I can go either way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You write: The main difference is, that when employed, but being paid by the hour, you can have a guaranteed minimum nr of hours you can work. So there's not as much risk involved.
In this business, there is zero risk of not reaching that minimum number of hours. The risk is entirely in the other direction, ie. being massively overworked. And if this doesn't apply to your company then clearly it's not part of the computing and Internet explosion. Maybe it's time to move elsewhere.
The objections to working freelance are entirely bogus, basically fostered by the management of yesteryear that is averse to paying the higher rates of technically skilled people on today's open market --- in other words, substantially more than they themselves are earning as non-technical administrators.
Welcome to the new world guys, which is a *technical* one in which it is tech skills that are the more important and scarce ones, and in which admin & management is in massive oversupply. Times change. Your should have studied those boring sciences at school.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
So far, what I've seen on this board is:
* Some people like salary because of security, lack of pressure
* Hourly wage, on average, is more lucrative for the employee
* Contractors usually receive hourly wage, and are seen sometimes as "mercenaries"
* Stock options/Bonuses are usually considered "extra" unless the company is a startup
* Corporate culture, or social setting is important, but hard to quantify in $$.
For the poster:
What kind of work is involved, and what kind of company are you? If it is highly research-oriented (find out how to optimize network activity, design a new algorithm to ), then I would strongly recommend salary/bonus, as the work is not easily quantifiable, but the results are.
If you are a startup (looking to IPO sometime soon), stock options are *very* appealing. Note, however, that unless you see your stock doing very well, the options often cause more contention than they are worth. Touchy subject.
If the work your employees perform is fairly quantifiable (ie, Joe spent 50 hours at work this week, so he performed 25% more work than Suzy, who worked the standard 40), then hourly wage is appropriate, and recommended.
Regarding overtime, I see this as independent of the whole salary/hourly thing. If you expect your average employee to work overtime, they you better well *pay* for it. preIPO Startups pay with stock options; privately owned co.'s who are not going public for some time should pay with overtime. NOTE: well managed overtime benefits are clearly visible to the employee and will result in lower degree of turnover.
On the other hand, if you are not so concerned about turnover, you can afford to be mrPHB here.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
What I've never understood is why alleged supporters of the free market are happy with business costs and rewards being governed by supply and demand, and yet for some odd reason they feel that if they do the same it's predatory.
It's easy to see why employers sometimes encourage that view, but the technical community needs to see beyond it. It's a technical world now, it is *your* skills that are of utmost importance to your (presumably hi-tech) company, and there is no reason in the world why you should be earning less than a member of the Board of Directors --- top technical competence assumed, of course.
Anyone can push paper, but few can do our work. Why shouldn't your income reflect that?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
#define salary NO_OVERTIME
#define hourly OVERTIME
Several people here have made the statement, "I like being salary because if I spend the afternoon reading
Now, if you are hourly, the following good things happen:
At my first job as an software engineer, I was salary non-exempt (work 40 hrs/week, get paid overtime). My project was seriously underestimated (happened before I was hired), and I worked 75+ hour weeks for about three months. Fresh out of college, I was taking home (after taxes) $2500 every two weeks (and this was twelve years ago). This had two distinct benefits: I had lots of money to pay off my loans with, and no time to spend it on anything else!
Now, some people say, "But what if I work 30 hrs this week, and 50 next week?" That's where a smart company will introduce compensation time (comp time). You can place some time into the comp time bank, and take it back out later, or take it as overtime. Ususally, companies that do this and also pay overtime have you get comp time for working 50.
In my opinion, the only time pure salary exempt makes sense is when it is very difficult to determine when you are working. Example: If you are an artist for a company, and you go for a hike in the woods for inspiration. Are you working? Do you bill those hours? Or if you are a CEO, and you go golfing and lunching with some VC's to fund the expansion of your engineering department. How do you bill those hours? In those cases, salary makes sense. But if you can clearly document when you work (even if it is at weird times like most I.S. folks have to work) then you should be hourly.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As it is, I can spend an afternoon, say, with a book on my lap, boning up on a subject which is only borderline relevant to my job.
I've done both. The difference, to me, was more hours worked hourly. That's it. Sometimes 17 hours a day. It was tiring, but I got *paid* for it.
I wrote stuff like that down as "research."
Reading Slashdot was "research" that I did when there was nothing else to do, like when I was waiting for a piece of hardware to arrive.
I could go over to the nearby magazine place and pick up Dr. Dobb's or those European electronics magazines. Again, "research."
My employers always knew what I was doing, and didn't bug me about it. I used specific techniques learned from those magazines in my projects. I simply showed them what interesting information I gained and they knew that it was actually making me more productive.
I guess it depends on who you work for.
Martin
I am astounded by what you write about contractors. One of three things must have happened: either (i) contractors are different where you work [I can't believe that, since you're in the UK]; or (ii) you have had a huge number of awful experiences, in which case you must fire your supply agencies immediately (and sue them for being incompetent if you have a large legal department), and think about severely questioning the people who interviewed those contractors as they must have been deaf, blind and probably dumb; or (iii) you don't have enough skills to freelance yourself, you have a massive inferiority complex as a result of it, and you lie to boot.
In my fairly extensive career as a contractor, I have known several hundred others, as well as several hundred permanent colleagues. Of the contractors, maybe 2 were incompetent, and maybe 5 were 9-5 people to whom it was just a job. The number of permanent staff I have known in both of these categories is in the many dozens.
With very minor exceptions, in all those places I have worked (mainly large computer and communications companies), contractors behave as professionals, and very competent ones. If your experience is different then something is very, very wrong.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
When you get paid a salary, you aren't just getting paid a direct equivalent of an hourly wage. If you are offered a job with a salary based on the above formula, run, don't walk to the next potential employer.
In my particular case, as a salaried employee I'm compensated extremely well, even though I get nothing(but gratitute, and an increase in my "future earnings potential") for overtime. It's just factored into the salary. Then on top of that, there's the added benefits of job security, stocks, insurance, retirement, etc.
--GnrcMan--
Your experience may also have been the result of unwillingness to pay the market rate for quality contract staff. If you pay rates close to the bottom of the scale (which is still more than permanent staff get -- that's how the market works in this time of scarcity), you should expect less than top-notch excellence. Don't even bother offering less than 40 UKP/hr in the Internet area for example if you're looking for all-round competence, or 30 UKP/hr for good skill in any one subdiscipline. Rather than offering bottom rate, you'd be better off getting college dropouts, often good value because quite a few probably ended up playing with computers instead of studying.
The other possibility that comes to mind is that you've been hiring through cowboy agencies. You get what you pay for in agencies as well. A well-reputed agency will try to maintain that reputation, even to the extent of immediately replacing someone that hasn't come up to scratch. But it's important that you make it known to them that you are seeking top professional staff -- write it into your contract with them, so that *they* have to sort out the mess on your behalf should you ever have another such disastrous experience. Don't let them get away with supplying sub-standard placements, even in times of shortage.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
As a contractor in the same company:
And the list goes on...
For me the choice between being a contractor vs. a salaried employee is a no brainer. I think anyone that does a good job would find that choice easy.
I know that the question was salaried vs hourly, and that hourly is not neccessarily being a contractor. But contractors ALWAYS are hourly, so I think the comparison might illustrate what an employe might gain if they go hourly instead of salaried.
and today and yesterday, as well as all other holidays, are paid double time and a half. Can't beat that.
The main difference between the salaried worker and the hourly worker is that the salaried one usually believes he or she is a professional and not a tradesperson/artesan. This is a common (mis)belief of the programming art, as well as engineers, managers, etc.
I have the fortune of knowing various people involved in telecom, such as troubleshooters, network designers, etc., mostly working for Bell Atlantic. These people work hard to avoid promotion, where they would be given management responsibilities and a salary instead of their hourly wage. They seem to like the fact that they can put in extra hours in November and then have a sizable paycheck and the flexibility to take extra time off for the Christmas season.
I have also worked where everyone was on salary, and there was a sad little time compensation package that never panned out to good stuff. If you put in overtime, you would receive "comp time", or paid hours off, which you were culturally expected not to take, especially after you racked up several weeks of it.
I personally liked having a consistent paycheck. It made planning easier, and my hours were erratic to say the least. I also have trouble remembering to fill out my timecards.
In general, I think money is the most limiting factor of business. To answer your question, I think that you may do well to provide both options, and just notify your employees that they have choices. Or, better, you could sit your employees down in a room and have them design the compensation package and its options. I'm sure that the result would be reasonable.
You write: how can you compare decisions that may affect the lives of thousands of employees and/or shareholders and the decisions which may make it difficult for some users to read their mail for an hour or two?
... try "some millions" instead. Countless businesses depend on those communications, many for their primary source of income. Yet you contrast it with the jobs of board directors who's main accountability seems to be to their own bank accounts, and who if they screw up usually get "punished" with a golden handshake. And worse, who seem not to care at all about the lives of those employeees to which you referred. [Shareholders do seem to be cared for, admittedly.]
You clearly underestimate the importance of computers and communications in modern living. You say "some users"
Well, let's put this on a more equal footing. There are many jobs in a corporation, some of which can be done by anybody and some of which can be done only by people with special skills. When it comes to ranking them, ask yourself a few simple questions, such as "Can the company survive without person or group X?", applied to everyone in the company. It might open your eyes a little.
In a closed system, most high-tech companies can survive without their top directors (because lower managers move up, and there are always some good ones around), but cannot survive at all without their skilled technical staff (promoting the tea lady doesn't help). Good directors and managers are important because they let the company do more than just survive, but still the key element is the technical one, a fact that they would like you to forget. In a non-closed system, professional skills are of course bought-in, and that's the case for tech positions now as much as directorships, and at long last, the rewards are starting to reflect the importance of technological expertise just as they have always reflected the importance of top management.
Some call this the Rise of the Techies, but whatever you call it, it's just a reflection on the realities in the world around us. Technology is become key.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hehe, nice one.
Well, I used to be an academic too, and I must say I initially viewed the transition from tenure to contracting with trepidation, one extreme to the other in terms of security, or so I thought.
But it turned out to be quite different. Real security is when your skills are needed by virtually all modern corporates, and when the rewards are high enough that it takes only a few years to buy your house outright. The security of having a regular paycheck forever in academia (unless you bugger the burser, so to speak) that is so tiny that you don't expect to pay off the mortgage before retirement, well, let's just say that it leaves something to be desired.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
And may it long continue!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
this problem isn't limited to the high tech community. My step dad works for a hunting and fishing store (a chain of stores) as manager. Like all of the management they pay him a salary with little or no overtime benefits, when it comes to doing hunting or tackle shows they call upon the store management to run the shows. The management is used because they don't have to pay the wage kiddies any overtime. It's a real shitbucket too, if the management complains or so much as asks for overtime they get "reassigned" or even fired. It's rough to quit or get fired because unlike high tech jobs the lowtech ones are harder and harder to find.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...We ask. Usually the topic will come up with coworkers over breaks (smoke, coffee, beating, whatever). Granted it is against company policy to discuss these things, but people are such that the topic does come up.
Usually it's something like:
--Man, they don't pay me enough for this sh*t.
--Don't worry. I probably make less than you anyway.
--How much less?
And there you are. You can either talk about it or not. Even if you don't say, "I make X per hour" or "I make X per year", saying "I bring home around 15% more than Joe" who everyone knows makes roughly 60k, is enough to get a good idea of who makes what. All it takes is one person's salary to use as a baseline and you can pretty much figure it out by percentages...
Jedi Hacker (Apprentice) and Code Poet
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
I guess it's a little late to be posting this, but I feel I should respond the suggestion that my company is "hard assed".
The very fact that they pay salary, rather than expect me to clock on and off, indicates that they are not "hard assed" (or arsed, as I'd put it)...
We are expected to account for our time, and "education" is one of the categories on the spreadsheet.
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