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>We have reserve pilots to help cover flying in December, and we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate — as much as

• maxxxxx 9y ago
  "we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate " In most tech companies they would maybe give you an extra pizza but certainly no extra pay.
  • chrisseaton 9y ago
    That's because most tech companies pay a salary rather than an hourly rate.
    • user5994461 9y ago
      Isnt't a salary just a predefined quota of hours and rate?
      • Alupis 9y ago
        > Isnt't a salary just a predefined quota of hours and rate? That depends on one's employment contract.
      • vanadium 9y ago
        In most companies I've been exposed to, it's the _minimum_ expected effort for the rate. It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position. You'd be surprised how illuminating that's been to those Juniors, and how much of an imprint it left on those folks as they progressed in their careers. A lot of people in our industry genuinely don't recognize how much they devalue themselves and diluting their hourly rate when they're putting in 60-80 hours a week.
        • ratsimihah 9y ago
          And everytime we start new jobs we're like "ok I'm doing 9 hours days max," but that never lasts.
          • namibj 9y ago
            In other countries it is illegal to work that much without being a manager.
            • Symbiote 9y ago
              More accurately, for Europe it would be illegal except for the business owner. A normal manager is still convered by the limit. (Actual limit is 48h/wk, averaged over several weeks.)
          • softawre 9y ago
            I have worked probably 20 days over 8 hours in my 10 year career. My team hardly ever works more than 8 hours these days. Depends what you do, but if you're a "normal" software company you should be able to get away with this. Work smartly - don't waste a bunch of time, recognize how much actual work your people can do in a day - and let them go home to recharge.
        • unethical_ban 9y ago
          >It's also why one of the first career mentorship steps I go through with Juniors is calculating their hourly rate with the assumption of 40 hours a week (per the ostensible employee agreement), and then calculating it against the _real_ hours worked per week after taking a position. My dept. is considering moving us from hourly to salary. I've expressed that I don't mind that as long as we get a pay increase equalling expected overtime. Let's see how that plays out.
          • taneq 9y ago
            My old job started requiring frequent work on remote sites. I was originally paid a bonus hourly rate while away (in lieu of my salary for those days), and they tried to move me from that setup to a slightly higher base salary but no extra pay for remote work. Of course, while they were quite happy with capping the amount they were paying me (at less than even my existing salary-plus-site-bonus), they always refused to accept a limit (any limit at all, not just one I felt reasonable) on the number of weeks a year I was expected to be away. Eventually I left and a friend of mine accepted their deal, he ended up racking up 400 hours of overtime (which he never got to take or got paid out) in his first three months.
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        Generally, no, especially for tech workers at common Silicon Valley pay scales, which are exempt under state and federal wage and hour laws. But lower-base-pay non-exempt employees sometimes are quoted a salary but with terms that make it a predefined quota of hours and rate that is in practice more like an hourly rate; these positions usually have paid leave so that, unless the leave is exhausted, it mostly only differs from a pure salary in that overtime is paid, either at straight, time-and-half, or double pay, depending on labor law and contract terms.
      • chrisseaton 9y ago
        No I think a salaried employee is a professional and supposed to put in the hours required to get the job done, within reason. For example if a client has come to see you and your boss wants to take everyone for a work dinner you wouldn't say 'sorry it's after hours' - you're paid full time and you're supposed to be there as required, and you don't quibble about the hours, within reason. Where as an hourly employee would say 'sorry I'm off the clock'.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • chrisbennet 9y ago
          "is a professional and supposed to put in the hours required to get the job done, within reason" Funny how it only goes one way. Not many employers are OK with someone taking Friday off because they got their work done early. Lots of employers will see nothing wrong with asking people to come in on the weekend. I think people forget that the employer/employee relationship is a value for value business relationship. As a professional I'm flexible but I'm not exploitable.
          • chrisseaton 9y ago
            Well flexibility is what I mean. Being a salaried employee means not clocking in-and-out, not quibbling about hours worked either way, and working with your employer rather than against them in some kind of by-the-hour adversarial relationship. Taking a salary means you are being responsible for what you achieve, not just mindlessly churning out the required number of hours.
            • feiofh398r39rty 9y ago
              Well, flexibility is what I mean. Being an employer of a salaried employee means signing more than just one fixed paycheck per 2 weeks, not questioning when someone requests to be paid more and working with your employees rather than against them in some kind of exact-amount-of-dollars adversarial relationship. Taking a salaried work means you are being responsible for the well-being of your employees, not just mindlessly handing out fixed amounts of money.
      • lostboys67 9y ago
        technically in the UK a Salaried position doesn't have fixed hours of work - this is a major social status indicator
    • maxxxxx 9y ago
      In Germany I had a salary too but overtime was paid by the hour. The math is pretty simple.
      • chrisseaton 9y ago
        Well what's the point of paying you a salary then if you're going to be counting your hours anyway?
        • MandieD 9y ago
          In Germany, compensation is usually negotiated on a monthly basis (X Euros per month, before tax). Employees sign contracts that are far more binding than American job offers - for both sides. For example, during the first six months, my employer or I could end it with a month's notice, without having to give a reason. Now that we're past that, I have to give three months' notice, and they have to be cutting headcount in Germany, unless I'm fired for cause, which absent actual criminal activity, requires proof that they tried to work with me over a long period of time to correct whatever they were unhappy about with my performance. That part is a very mixed blessing. On the one hand, I feel braver about trying things I think will be good for my company and pushing for what I think will work best. On the other, it's very hard to get rid of people who have lost interest in their work. Back to the hours vs. salary: many of us, especially at big, traditional companies, have contracts for a certain number of hours per week, usually 40, sometimes 35. Anything you work over that goes into your comp time account, anything below that is a debit on your comp time account. At my company, if I work outside the standard hours it a) requires agreement from the works council and b) gets paid at 2x time, with the overage paid out in my next paycheck. Depending on your contract, your comp time account might not be allowed to go above or below certain values. When it goes above, either your manager has to make you stay away, or the overage gets paid out at what your hourly rate would have been. Only people who are truly making manager money are outside this hours system. I used to balk at being sent home by 8pm or 10 working hours, but now I treasure it.
        • maxxxxx 9y ago
          Most employers count hours for salaried people. Try showing up for 30 hours for a while. In most companies someone will remind you to work more. Salaried mainly means a minimum amount of hours without overtime.
  • save_ferris 9y ago
    Not necessarily, a company I used to work for had to lay off a significant chunk of engineering but paid out big bonuses to those who stayed on. If there's a shortage of labor to do the job, money is a pretty easy way to simplify the problem. It's not a direct comparison, but then again, the jobs are pretty different to begin with.
    • s73ver_ 9y ago
      Money is the easiest way, but it seems like it's always the way of last resort, after everything else has been tried, and those things have blown up in their face.
  • nimchimpsky 9y ago
    to be fair having a few null pointers to create is a bit different to being reponsible for the lives of ~300.
  • ratsimihah 9y ago
    In most tech companies base salary is already 150 percent of the average salary.
    • wyager 9y ago
      Doesn’t mean it’s fair. I hope people haven’t forgotten that Apple and Google recently got busted for price-fixing salaries.
      • dailyvijeos 9y ago
        Yup. Also, Stanford abuses temp workers for years and years as standard practice to avoid paying benefits.
        • sjg007 9y ago
          The tech industry is notorious in using contractors as well.
    • dailyvijeos 9y ago
      New grads need to realize $100k/yr gross (~$70k net) at 100 hr/wk is ~ $13.50/hr net. So either get a better comp. package or refuse to work like a slave.
      • heartbreak 9y ago
        Yeah I think I’d start with 100hr/wk being absurd. I’ve worked at startups and 50 was an unusually high number of hours for a given week.
      • kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
        Most new grads (or employees in general) are NOT working 100 hrs a week, even in startups.
        • ben-schaaf 9y ago
  • tyingq 9y ago
    Unions are the difference here. If it was AA's IT department, and not pilots, pizza would have been the offer.
    • jachee 9y ago
      Union's also capping it at a contractual 150%. Free-market AA could offer better incentives, but the union doesn't think that's fair.
      • tyingq 9y ago
        That cap is likely in the contract as some trade-off for something else the pilots wanted. A free market does exist at some companies for pilots, and they are compensated and treated far less well than their unionized counterparts. Because of the specialized training, pilots have lots of leverage. You can't quickly and easily replace them.
        • klodolph 9y ago
          Pilots have leverage because you can’t replace them with other pilots. Imagine if Java developers weren’t legally allowed to write C# until they got certified… keep in mind it’s just an analogy.
          • tyingq 9y ago
            Sure, and it's more complex than that even. You might be qualified to fly an A320, but not over open water. And not without being checked on airline X's specific A320 configuration.
            • sjwright 9y ago
              You can also be qualified to land at some airports but not others!
          • Spooky23 9y ago
            Pilots have almost no leverage and the pilots association screwed up years ago. Because so many of them were the same age, the pilots voted long ago to screw over the younger pilots. It’s pretty easy to replace pilots. Entry level pilots make less than a fast food manager.
  • mgraczyk 9y ago
    Starting compensation at competitive tech companies is already higher than 150% of airline pilot compensation. Looks like a pilot with 10 years experience at AA makes 120k. An engineer with 10 years experience at Google makes around 300k. There are also far more engineers at competitive tech companies than there are airline pilots. I'd gladly trade an occasional 1.5x hourly bonus for a 2.5x salary.
    • verbify 9y ago
      Just a reminder that most software engineers don't work for one of the big five, and don't get compensated in the region of 300k.
      • mgraczyk 9y ago
        Most pilots don't work at a major airline, and don't make 120k.
        • drawnwren 9y ago
          Source? I'm pretty sure this isn't true. I worked in aviation for a while and you either work commercial, military, or private and there aren't a lot of private jobs. Edit: BLS says average pilot salary is 126k[2] and majority are employed by airlines. [1] You're wrong. 1: http://work.chron.com/average-commercial-airline-pilots-salary-11855.html http://work.chron.com/average-commercial-airline-pilots-sala... 2: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/airline-and-commercial-pilots.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...
          • mgraczyk 9y ago
            I don't think you read the BLS page correctly. The 126k figure is for a subset of pilots. Read the next sentence to see what the rest make. The page also doesn't give a figure for the proportion of airline pilots, only "pilots, copilot'slls, and flight engineers". I also said "major airline" to specifically make the apology with "big 5 software companies".
  • TomK32 9y ago
    Feeding your devs free pizza will make your software buggy and do things like... i don't know... bad stuff.
  • Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    It literally says in my contract that overtime can be considered a necessary part of the job so there's no extra pay. Mind you, doing overtime is rarely necessary over here, and you can compensate in the same month. There's also been an instance where we had to show up at night to do a release, those were compensated x2 (so 4 hours up at night = full day off)
  • ThePadawan 9y ago
    American tech companies Having worked in Germany and Switzerland, I can tell you how many hoops my employer had to jump through to make their software engineers eligible (!) to work on the weekend. By law, only "essential" personnel can be required to work weekends. All exceptions have to be white-listed on a case-by-case basis. In one case, I had to be present at a 8am meeting on a Monday, in a town 5 hours away. Since trains didn't run until 5am, my employer shelled out for 150% travel time on sunday. And they didn't grumble about it. If fewer companies could get away with paying "an extra pizza", I have the feeling that a lot of "essential work over the holidays" suddenly becomes non-essential really quickly.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  • rmc 9y ago
    I wonder if the fact that they have a union has anything to do with it....
• kevinmhickey 9y ago
  The union contracts + federal regulations lead to some surprising rules including max rates, mandatory time on and off, etc. There is a federal regulation for max number of hours flown per year, so the airlines and unions had to put rate-limits in place to prevent pilots from flying too much in the summer leading to free time off around the holidays. Nothing about that domain surprises me anymore.
  • sokoloff 9y ago
    There are federal law limits of 30 flight hours in 7 days, 100 flight hours in a month, in addition to the 1000 hours in a year limit.
• knownothing 9y ago
  > Interesting that there is a maximum rate. My research indicates that this is because in unions pay increases are based purely on seniority. Therefore, it is undesirable (from a union's perspective) to tie wages to anything other than seniority.
• double0jimb0 9y ago
  Or the union is flexing it's muscle to both sides, the sides the union hedges against each other for the union's own now-built-in profit share. Capture that value baby.
• tomohawk 9y ago
  > Looks like the pilots trust AA less than I do when they promise vouchers. I know several people who work in union shops, including airlines. They all have adversarial relationships with management. There's a lot of gamesmanship and working to rule even if that prevents actual work from getting done. It's funny to hear them complaining sometimes about trying to get good vacation slots, etc, because the guys who've been there the longest get all the priority due to union rules and they get what's left over.
  • rconti 9y ago
    Yup. I heard on the radio (also NPR) that the union expects flights to be cancelled. And the union seems to be laughing ("Santa Claus giving everyone the day off") about the problem. And the union contract prevents paying more than 150% to fill the slots. Yeah, this will go well.
    • rev_bird 9y ago
      So the company approves vacation time for its employees, then wants to take it away because they don't know how to use a calendar, and you're blaming the union for the entire thing?
      • RHSeeger 9y ago
        Mistakes were made, and it's not unreasonable to expect both sides to work together to serve the "greater good" (getting people where they need to go during the holidays) instead of just saying "you made a mistake, screw everyone who has their plans ruined".
      • rconti 9y ago
        The airline made an honest mistake (clearly they didn't want this to happen), and the union laughs in their faces and the contract they pushed prevents the airline from doing more to remedy the situation. I'm obviously blaming the airline first. But the obvious remedy is to pay the pilots even more than 150%. I wonder what the ultimate solution will be. Maybe it'll be easier to weasel out of it by yanking vacation from employees than simply paying 300% (or something).
• nradov 9y ago
  For good general background on airline union issues written from a "hacker" perspective see Philip Greenspun's article. He's an engineer who switched careers and worked as a regional airline pilot. http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines
• wastedhours 9y ago
  > Interesting that there is a maximum rate. I always thought this was to limit the incentive to cram extra working hours in (so as to avoid fatigue), interesting that it's probably more of a negotiation point.
• bildung 9y ago
  > we are paying pilots who pick up certain open trips 150 percent of their hourly rate — as much as we are allowed to pay them per the contract Pretty sure this is not correct. The contract most probably prevents the union from demanding more for overwork, but doesn't prevent the employer to voluntarily pay more. The 150% cap in the contract is most probably a concession the unionized pilots granted in exchange for some benefit, e.g. "we want a better 401k employer match! Ok, but only if you agree to cap maximum overpay at 150%."
  • fapjacks 9y ago
    Yes, and additionally it seems the AA rep is using some pretty sneaky weasel words, making it seem like the contract is to blame for the limitation on overtime, when we can pretty much guarantee it's not. Capped overtime pay is something the airline demanded, for sure.
    • dkarl 9y ago
      Capped overtime pay is something the airline demanded, for sure. Probably, yes, but I could also imagine the union wanting a cap as well, to limit the airline's power to resolve situations like this without having to negotiate with the union. The union is clearly pissed off that the airline hasn't needed to involve them yet. If the airline can't unilaterally offer higher pay to the pilots to fix this problem, that gives the union a chance at benefiting from it.
• pikchurn 9y ago
  > Interesting that there is a maximum rate. Besides the other excellent reasons given, these sorts of clauses sometimes exist to protect the company. If the union has control over who works, as is often the case, they could choose to allow excessive overtime and make the airlines pay out for it regardless of whether circumstances really demanded it. They don't usually do this because it's not in the favor of the union to keep people out of work. But there are always extraneous circumstances that could result in such outcomes, for example a national emergency that causes a shortage of pilots and those who stick around are contractually able to pull in ridiculous overtime while at the same time AA is restricted from changin flight schedules based on labor costs alone, etc.
• olympus 9y ago
  Funny anecdote I heard from a friend who's a United pilot- he wouldn't take a job with AA because they have such a bad reputation among pilots: The AA pilots had a big dispute with AA corporate once, and nearly went on strike over it. Instead of striking they took advantage of the fact that they are paid hourly and taxied at a near crawl at the airport, causing delays for every AA flight and costing the airlines money in terms of pay as well as lost revenue. AA pilots are the slowest taxiers to this day, and my friend curses every time he gets behind one. As a contrast, Southwest pays pilots by the trip, so it's in the pilot's best interest to move quickly. Southwest pilots allegedly send presents to the controllers and in return they get bumped up in line for takeoff and landing.