17 ms·

Is Being Salaried a Scam?

177 points by jasonhansel 6y ago

maxharris 6y ago
I saved a significant amount of the money I made as a salaried employee, about $110k in total, over a five-year period. What did I do with it? I bought Tesla stock right after the crash last March, and now I'm retired at age 40. I recently moved out of California into in a luxury apartment in Tennessee, where prices and taxes are low. I am completely free to do as I please. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810
- nojito 6y ago
  So you gambled and got lucky. You really shouldn't assume that your story is the norm.
  - maxharris 6y ago
    "Luck" is a way of coping with the fact that someone else did the work required to choose wisely and you didn't. It is especially insidious because it ensures poverty in direct proportion to the extent you rely upon it to guide your actions.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
      What advice do you have for somebody who is yet to retire? Buy a stock which is about to boom?
      - maxharris 6y ago
        If you don't have a lot of money to invest, it's far better to put that cash into developing yourself. That can be as simple as reading books such as The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen or The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, or following an interest you already have (mine are things like machining, chemistry, structural engineering, neon art). If you have a business idea, one of the best books I've read is The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia. Making stuff is a lot easier than learning whether or not you're on the right track without spending everything you have. The last thing I'd suggest is to be concerned with history and America's oncoming fascist trainwreck. Peikoff wrote The Ominous Parallels forty years ago, and his words are every bit as chilling as they are prescient.
        hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
        How does any of that relate to investing in Tesla?
        maxharris 6y ago
        Investing intelligently isn't a matter of luck. The ability to think very broadly and deeply helps a lot. Be curious! Read stuff! Don't blindly copy others.
        distances 6y ago
        Tesla in the last year has been a meme stock with valuation that has no connection to reality or any fundamentals. Is this what you predicted with your research?
        maxharris 6y ago
        That’s what you think. I disagree, obviously, which is why I haven’t sold any shares. Why don’t we come back to this in five years? I am pretty sure I’ll still be rich, and you'll come up with more evasions to explain why you aren't.
        dataangel 6y ago
        > The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand Oh yeah, buying into a cult whose entire appeal is convincing selfish people they can stop feeling bad about it, you're very very developed. Also hysterical that this nose-to-the-grindstone approach is what you're advocating when you retired over a one time return from a super volatile stock.
        maxharris 6y ago
        Let's check back in five years ;) I'm maxharris9 on Twitter
    - DC1350 6y ago
      The luck part is that you could have made the same prediction about lots of different companies that didn’t increase as much as Tesla. I think it’s reasonable to take credit for predicting the direction of the stock, but 10xing your money in a single year is lucky.
    - nojito 6y ago
      It’s “wise” when it works but it’s gambling. Nothing wrong with it but individuals shouldn’t assume that the only way to succeed is by gambling.
  - eulers_secret 6y ago
    Agreed, putting all your eggs in one basket like this is just gambling. This person got lucky, but make no mistake anyone else reading this: IT IS STUPID AND YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE. MOST DO. If you want to do something with your $100K, use it as a house down-payment or consider mutual funds. Or just yeet it into GME, I'm not a financial advisor.
    - maxharris 6y ago
      If you don't know what Williams %R is, can't fathom the concept of normalized average true range, have never studied corporate history in the automotive and computer industries, and have no idea of the effects of monetary policy, you might just be gambling. Fortune really does favor the curious :)
    - WWWWH 6y ago
      More realistically, he was just speaking casually. It’s highly unlikely anyone would be stupid enough to put everything into one stock.
      - maxharris 6y ago
        No, I wasn't speaking casually. https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/1370117445378265088 https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/1370117445378265088 11.14% Bitcoin, 87.96% TSLA, 0.90% ARKG. NB: this is not investment advice. What worked for me in the past may not work for you now. Do your own research.
- syspec 6y ago
  Weird flex, but okay
  - maxharris 6y ago
    My linked post is timestamped and proved to be quite correct. I actually think it's quite helpful, especially to people that are actually capable of learning from others.
- notsuoh 6y ago
  Based on your other comments you're attributing your stock pick to an ability on your part and not blind luck like it is. Socrates said that he's better off because he knows nothing and knows he knows nothing, whereas others know nothing but think they know something. Paraphrasing, but this seems applicable to your situation.
twirlock 6y ago
It is when they turn around and try to pretend you're not, i.e. when they try to take away all the consideration for exempt status and treat you like an hourly worker while still milking extra time out of you.
qntty 6y ago
This was the most interesting part to me: The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay. And some places work like that, and when they do it’s mostly fine. When you have that kind of trade-off, that flexibility is a benefit. But at a lot of places, that flexibility is much more one-way. You’re expected to work the company’s standard business hours at a minimum, plus any additional time it takes to get your job done. If you have to work 45 hours one week, that’s just what’s expected of salaried workers. But if you work 36 hours the next week, you’re going to be charged four hours of PTO (or you’re going to get weird looks and questions about why you left at 1 pm on Friday).
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  If someone's backlog goes to zero, their manager can't find more work that needs to be done, and there is no reason that person needs to be available during core working hours, requiring them to sit in the office and kill time is ridiculous. The catch is that for most of us, those conditions are almost never met. When was the last time had a job where the entire backlog of work was cleared out and there were no tasks you could be helping with? Usually if that happens more than a few times, the team is on their way to being reassigned or even laid off. The 40-hour workweek target is best viewed as a feedback loop. If everyone is consistently working more than 40 hours per week, something is wrong. Team size needs to be increased, schedules need to be pushed out, scope needs to be reduced, inefficiencies (meetings!) need to be pulled out of the way. Something has to give. Likewise, if someone is consistently running out of work early, the schedule needs to be brought in, the person should help take pressure off of some other tasks, blockers need to be removed, and so on. The challenge as a manager is that estimation and work-assignment are a two-way process. I work with team members to assign backlog tasks. If someone is consistently taking 20 hours of work for themselves and pretending its a full work week, someone else has to pick up the remaining work.
  - busterarm 6y ago
    Our team probably has a 3-5 year backlog of things that could be done, but largely it does not make sense to do them. I only tackle a little bit of it with my idle time each week. Reason being, work that gets done requires code-reviews and often communication and understanding within the organization. I personally might have the bandwidth but collectively as a team and an organization, we do not. And I prefer if my whole team has a little bit of breathing room like this. It means we're rested and prepared to tackle the hard problems and fires that come our way. Nobody burns out. Realistically I don't want anyone putting in more than 32-33ish hours most weeks.
ipnon 6y ago
>The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay. I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack and promptly responding to merge requests, looking as busy as possible. My coworkers who feel the need to work a certain number of hours (40), invariably work overtime every week because their work expands to fit their perceived availability. They all get paid twice as much as me, but if I'm working half the hours is that equal compensation? I say no, because I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.
- deleted 6y ago
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- rubicon33 6y ago
  Where do you work where employees who work twice as much, make twice as much? The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner. It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.
  - etothepii 6y ago
    Maybe too many companies have been burned by the undocumented mess left by the "above and beyond" crowd who move on after two years?
    - deleted 6y ago
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  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
the_jeremy 6y ago
I don't see any new information in here. Corporations try to maximize profits, individuals try to maximize money and free time. Corporations have more power than an individual when trying to bargain. However, corporations don't really care about hours, they care about your performance reviews (though your performance reviews can be easily colored by how much time your reviewers believe you work). I think it would be interesting to see how many people here spend under 40 hr/wk on their full time job.
- donbrae 6y ago
  I work 31 hours over four days, which I guess is somewhere between part time and full time. For comparison, the standard, full-time working week here (Scotland) for private- and public-sector office-based jobs is 35 or 37.5 hours. (I choose to work less so I can spend more time on side-projects that make no money.)
bigmattystyles 6y ago
The 40 hour part can be. It’s conveniently ignored by management and many workers have convinced themselves that it’s noble to do more than you’re paid for. Combine that with peer pressure and you get what we have. Personally, I’ve found that in the vast majority of cases, any more than 35-40 hours per week consistently yields diminishing returns, even with busy work. I’ve been fortunate in my life with great management, where I’m on average 40 hours a week, and if I do pull a few 50-60 hours per week, there’s an unspoken agreement that I’ll do a couple 30 hour weeks. But you shouldn’t have to luck out with good management.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I’m pretty convinced that if I could have my engineers work 4-5 times 4-5 hours blocks of deep, focused work per week - meaning work that is at the very limit of their cognitive and programming abilities, and do another 8-10 hours of the necessary corporate overhead, that we’d collectively get at least twice as much done per year. One difficulty is that a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit, but even with that set aside, it seems impossible to pivot to such a world with teams beyond a very small total company size.
  - b3kart 6y ago
    > a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit Is this sort of work potentially automate-able?
    - bigmattystyles 6y ago
      Most of them are not even worthy of automation. We waste time doing processes that are orthogonal or were shoehorned in because they worked for another team or division. But I get it, we somehow have to communicate with the remainder of an organization. I guess it’s the least bad of all the alternatives, especially if the system is open to change through reflection.
morpheos137 6y ago
I don't see how it is a scam. You just divide your weekly salary by average number of hours you work per week to get your effective hourly wage. The only scammy thing about it is if the company leads you to believe you will be working 40 hours a week on average and you actually end up working 60. Long work hours is not a good thing regardless if you are salary or hourly. Salary workers typically have greater self direction in how they accomplish their work assignments. In a well functioning workplace NOT having over time compensation as is the case for salary workers can incentivise productivity.
whateveracct 6y ago
i'm sure many newly-remote workers are learning that when they aren't forced to have butts in seats in the office 40hrs/week, there's opportunity to work 20-30hrs/week without consequences - thus hugely increasing their effective hourly wage. so it cuts both ways.
- samsonradu 6y ago
  Actually 20-30hrs/week might be an overshoot. I'm surprised to see that for a lot of my friends teleworking means about 1h of work per day and an occasional meeting.
  - matwood 6y ago
    Now the question is what is 'work', and what is the company paying for? Knowledge work is tricky because it straddles the line between hours worked and knowledge applied. A junior employee might work 10h/day to figure out a problem/get something working/etc... whereas a senior person may solve the same thing in 1h. This isn't the mythical 10x programmer, it's just experience and knowledge coming out when needed. The one with more knowledge also tends to accelerate their acquisition. One, because they can get the work done so quickly, they have time to keep expanding their knowledge. Two, they have all this groundwork knowledge which makes it easier to expand on. So while it may look like your friend only 'works' for 1h/day, you could be missing all the time spent so that your friend could finish the work in only 1h.
    - samsonradu 6y ago
      I follow your point, though knowing more about them I actually incline for a different conclusion. There is a lot of slack in the corporate economy which became more transparent under wfh.
      - matwood 6y ago
        > There is a lot of slack in the corporate economy which became more transparent under wfh. Sure, but that's nothing new. When I was younger I worked in a big corp type job. After a few weeks I noticed this older guy would go play tennis at lunch a few times/week, and then take a nap under his desk afterwards. Normally, he would then leave around 3pm. One day after this happened, I ask someone what's this guys deal. Turns out, he's the only one who knew how to work on system XYZ. Others had some vague idea in case this guy was hit by a bus, but he did 99.9% of the work on this system. Also turns out, it didn't need a lot of work done.
devadvance 6y ago
This could be helpful to some folks. I appreciate the clear distinction between "salaried" and "exempt", as that's something I've seen many folks misunderstand. It's worth noting that, if you're in the United States, minimum salary for exemption also varies by state [0]. For example, as of 2021 in California, for many professions it is now 58k USD. [0] https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/exempt-employees-minimum-salary-requirements-for-2021 https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/exempt-employees-minimum-sal...
beforeolives 6y ago
> For most salaried people at my company who I’ve spoken to, it sounds like the norm is minimum 45-hour weeks, with bad weeks being as much as 60 hours. Getting breaks or lunches seems rare, if it happens at all, and work can bleed into other areas of your life. This is very specific to the employer and doesn't have much to do with salaries vs hourly. To jump from there to "salaried is a scam" is a bit too far.
jonplackett 6y ago
I’m curious, in the US, is there a link between being salaried and having health insurance? I’m in the UK and our company gives full time employees health insurance but freelancers (the hourly paid workers) not. Is that the not the same in the US? Because that would seem like a big deal.
- duxup 6y ago
  Very generally, salaried jobs tend to pay better, and include better benefits, flexibility, paid time off, etc. It's not a direct connection that salaried must be better pay and benefits, but it is how it works out most of the time. Also I really question the premise of this article so this 'scam' thing should be taken with a grain of salt, a lot of them.
- stonesweep 6y ago
  It's based on number of hours worked, rather than hourly vs. salary. The Affordable Healthcare Act defines the number at 30 hours a week for more than 120 days a year where an employer must offer insurance.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    That’s interesting. Thanks. In that case hourly work really does seem better, if you can get it reliably anyway.
    - walshemj 6y ago
      Normally beyond a certain seniority point you become salaried in the uk almost all Managerial or Professional jobs are salaried.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      It’s not all employers though, only those with 50 or more employees.
    - stonesweep 6y ago
      Interestingly, at my company it's based on skill level - everyone works the ~40hr work week, however skill tiers 1-2 are hourly employees and skill tiers 3+ are salaried. On average, the company encourages a healthy work/life balance and > 40 is not normal even for salaried, so it's really specific to how the company staffs their needs.
david-cako 6y ago
Salaries are an information game (that employees aren't winning), so it's limited, the extent that I'm willing to bottleneck my income at whatever Glassdoor/Linkedin horseshit a company is working off of. You can easily quadruple your income doing smart contract work, especially if you can reuse code across projects, whereas for salaried roles, you are mostly going to get incremental raises over your past salaried jobs. There are different ebbs and flows to each type of work, so it's worth trying both for folks to see what they like. Job hopping for raises works for some people, but it also seems to lead to a lot of churn and lower expectations of trust and loyalty for salaried employees in the tech industry. Not my style. A business cutting edge-to-edge with another business is a more reciprocal arrangement, but there are some downsides and more stress.
- kradroy 6y ago
  As someone who lived on contract work for 5 years the "quadrupling of income" isn't a reasonable metric. Invariably your wage gets diluted. At salaried positions you don't have to deal with: - Clients who pay late - Clients who don't want to pay - Clients who disappear with a large, unpaid bill - Finding clients (ideally ones who don't need cajoling to pay on time) - Self-employment taxes and managing expenses for deductions - Providing your own health coverage and managing the benefits one would get at a full-time position - Being your own safety net during periods of no work - Legal exposure
vmception 6y ago
> To be exempt, you must earn a salary of at least $35,568 and perform relatively high-level work as your primary duties. Just to clarify, this means this is an article about someone making less than $35,568/yr plus overtime that doesn't know how to get an exempt salary that is like 2 - 8 times greater than that? I don't think this debate really applies to any of the American residents, or anybody working for the American companies on this forum. The inflection points where it makes a difference is so low.
cgrealy 6y ago
Don’t work overtime for free. It’s that simple. Sure, the occasional late night or weekend is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, but even then your manager should recognise that and let you take some time in lieu. If you are regularly working 45+ hours a week, your position is under-resourced for what is expected. Talk to your manager. Either the work load needs to reduce, or you need additional people and/or skills/training to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. If nothing is done, leave.
- madamelic 6y ago
  That's just fine for (software) engineers, but I can't imagine this going well for an employee in a employer's market.
  - yetihehe 6y ago
    It depends on where you work. In most of europe, overtime is paid more than normal salary, even 1.5x. If your employer is forcing you to have unpayed overtime, he will have big problems.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - ma2rten 6y ago
      Right. It's the same in the US, but if you make over $35,568 your position can be exempt from this. OP is asking if being exempt is a scam.
    - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
      If you read the article it talks about exempt vs non-exempt and how salaried workers that make over $35,568 and do "higher-level work" are exempt from overtime. Those that are not exempt get 1.5x pay for overtime and 2x for double overtime (e.g. overtime on holiday). So in the US overtime is always 1.5x but many salaried workers simply don't get overtime.
supernova87a 6y ago
FFS. Which do you want? You want the $ figure and job security of the salaried employee, but not the duties. You don't want to be classified like a contract worker, subject to termination at any time, but you want the flexibility to work when and as you please. You want the freedom to not have your hours monitored, your steps and productivity measured, but not the responsibilities that come with such autonomy. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create some parallel lalaland universe where normal constraints no longer worked as they do. While we're at it, I want an airplane that's cheap, fast, doesn't use liquid fuel, and doesn't hurt the environment. I think we can all be billionaires.
- maxrev17 6y ago
  I think being salaried is a scam, so I run my own business. It really is that simple. The choice is there if people are upset about being salaried. Those who are salaried and work 60 hour weeks + commute need to wake up and smell the coffee - if they are moderately good they would make bank self employed.
  - virgilp 6y ago
    It's really not that simple. I made a small fortune being salaried. Would I have made the same money self-employed? Maybe, but I'm not sure - the risks are a lot higher (the rewards too, but like I said, far less certain).
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I'm not sure the risks are that high. I mean in a downturn you might see revenue halve, if you work for someone else you might be the unlucky one whose salary drops to zero.
      - virgilp 6y ago
        Yes the risks are not that high, but neither are the rewards. Basically you choose to do something (marketing, sales, dealing with bad clients) over something else (meetings, corporate bullshit, dealing with bad managers). Maybe you get more financial upside on average (especially if you're good at marketing/sales) for slightly less security/peace of mind (as employee if you get sick, or have a child, you still get a salary; you can have paid vacations, etc). Sure, freelancer/consultant is a valid path, but only if you're good at (and enjoy) marketing & sales. Otherwise - you can get lucky to work for a startup that IPOs (or a company whose shares increase dramatically) and end up earning a lot more as salaried.
duxup 6y ago
>Being salaried is often a scam. >Not always. It depends on how a company implements it. But often. I'd really like to see something that backs up this "often" and how many people really work more hours because they're 'expected to' or ... choose to. I'm reminded of OSHA rules that dictate workplace safety. Sometimes it's argued that they're there to keep employers from creating unsafe conditions, but when you read accident reports you find folks willing to take personal risks to the benefit of no one ... all on their own. There are employers who will pressure folks, but IMO a lot of folks who misinterpret / don't deal with what they think are pressures to work more ... and folks who just do it on their own... I think this is all a lot more nuanced and 'often' is presented here without much reason to think that's accurate.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  Yeah, for the most part, the point of the OSHA rules is not because employers are forcing the workers to do risky things, but so that employers put processes in place to monitor and prevent their workers from going off and doing risky things. Most people are self-motivated, but they may not be good judges of risk, and a small group of employees go off and do something reckless, get hurt, and now everyone needs to follow safety protocols that reduce risky behavior even if these impose a cost for the 90% that would use common sense and avoid danger. The counterargument is we know something about human nature, so procedures that are dangerous to reckless people is a problem when you are a large business and a given percent of your workforce is going to be reckless.
CuriousNinja 6y ago
This is because the US labor laws are messed up. In other countries, you get paid overtime even if you are salaried.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Not in the UK and other countries.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Depends on the company. Some certainly do.
    - walshemj 6y ago
      In which country? in the UK its part of the definition. TOIL and on call allowances are not the same as paid OT here.
- Gatsky 6y ago
  Can verify. In Australia being salaried is definitely superior.
  - LilBytes 6y ago
    Anecdote: I'm in Australia, salaried. And I'm getting fucked. 200+ hours over time over the course of last year. 0% pay rise. But we got $1000 stocks pre-tax which equated to a little over 0.6% pay rise. Yay /s I'm voting with my feet though. Should be getting a job offer (hopefully!) in the next few days.
    - Gatsky 6y ago
      Yeah I've done a lot of unpaid overtime as well, don't even bother to count it mostly, what's the point. But being salaried is still superior for the large majority of people. This becomes more evident the older you get, when benefits like maternity/paternity leave, long service leave, paid annual leave etc become more useful. There is also the matter of getting a loan - huge disparity based on employment status there. Another factor is if you fall sick or can't work as usual for some reason. Australia has laws which make it hard to get fired (unfair dismissal legislation), providing even more security to the salaried.
dan-robertson 6y ago
So I feel like this is basically irrelevant to most people. Maybe having hourly pay and overtime is better but it’s generally not a simple choice between exempt or non-exempt employment because the exempt positions tend to be more highly paid and therefore more desirable. Moreover, if you’re an efficient worker, you may feel there are better incentives for you to be paid for that efficiency if you’re salaried. It also feels irrelevant for me (and most people on HN?) because the sort of work I do (computer programming) tends to be salaried. There are self-employed contractors but I feel like they don’t count as they’re also exempt (I think) and they get to choose their rates. When I saw the title I thought it would be comparing employment to contracting or entrepreneurialism. I feel like the things that will have a big impact for compensation are more long-term, discretionary, or growth related (if you’re going to get an x% pay rise every year then your starting pay makes a big difference to the total over all the years), eg promotions/equity/bonuses/switching employers.
dd_roger 6y ago
The premise of the article is incorrect to begin with: > The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. If I ever have to work over time, then I get one hour of PTO for each hour of OT. I don't know if it's an American thing to assume that all companies must be predatory toward their employees or if it's just the internet populist bubble that favors such content, but neither I nor anyone I know can relate to these kinds of articles.
- plorkyeran 6y ago
  The work arrangement you are describing is not that of an exempt salaried employee.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  > No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. That’s not salaried exempt. What you’re describing is closer to hourly pay. However, it’s not a perfect fit because hourly pay is 1.5x after 40.
  - dd_roger 6y ago
    My bad, I wasn't familiar with this working arrangement and the vocabulary around it. What I'm describing is simply known as being salaried in my country (not hourly paid as OT is compensated with PTO rather than financial compensation), the vast majority of white collars have such contracts here.
- walshemj 6y ago
  Your not salaried then ie no fixed hours
didibus 6y ago
Yes it is, but also not really. Basically, you get what you can with the leverage you have. Tech jobs seem to have gotten themselves in a salaried position, and I think that's just the compromise that tech workers were able to negotiate with companies. It be really nice to just clock in and clock out. Not care about how much work is remaining, and operate like a barista, I just show up, serve up some lines of code, a few code reviews, hand out a few estimates and suggest a technical approach to business and then on the dot clock out. If the company feels things aren't going fast enough, they'd need to work harder to not waste my precious clock-in time, keep me busy on the most important things always, or pay me double for extra time. But instead they started to approach employees with the salaried proposition, and some people said yes. So here we are. Now it's not that bad, you need to learn to manage your own time, your own work/life balance. It does mean you can decide what hour to show up to work and when to leave (to some extent). It means your launch break can be twice as long if you want it to be sometimes. It also means that if things aren't going as fast as they need too, it's your responsability to manage your time and commitments better. It's up to you now to make sure you are focused and kept working on the most important thing, that you say no to distractions and make sure the processes favor productivity instead of churn and endless debates. It's up to you to make sure you don't take on work that won't deliver on expectations, and thus up to you to manage those expectations, etc. But it means sometimes you can take more vacation than you technically have to take as long as your manager and team can work them in, etc. The biggest downside to me is that it makes the environment more competitive. Basically how much your coworkers will choose to work will set the standards, and it'll be hard for you to do less. If people start responding to emails at night and on weekends, if people make late fridays the norm, or extra Sunday "catch up on todos" a norm, you kind of have too as well now. So when you have a family and outside commitments I think it gets harder to manage, because you can't easily plan around variable hours, you have a more unpredictable schedule, you don't really know if next month will be extra busy and you'll need to push in to the evenings or if it'll be the opposite, etc.
- walshemj 6y ago
  "gotten themselves"???? professional jobs have been salaried since for ever.
mkl95 6y ago
Are mandatory, unpaid lunch breaks a scam? 1-2 hour mandatory, unpaid breaks are the norm in my country (Spain). This means even if you WFH (no commute), you will actually spend somewhere between 9 and 10 hours at work every day. Another custom here is doing a few minutes of unpaid overtime every day. If you add both things, a full time employee who works from home spends somewhere between 45 and 55 hours at work every week. Is wage theft still wage theft if it's part of a place's culture? My "hot take" is that it 100% is.
- tkiolp4 6y ago
  > Are mandatory, unpaid lunch breaks a scam? IMHO, yes.
deleted 6y ago
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notaslave 6y ago
In my experience, as others pointed out, its a one way street. If we work 6 hours a day instead of 8, we will get fired. But if they make us work 15 hours a day, nothing happens to them. I am a salaried/exempt employee working for a client. My employer charges the client per hour, and theoretically, I am allowed to get paid for the extra hours I work. But my immediate manager won't allow it because the budget is allocated for the year, and if I bill extra hours, there will be a shortage of budget (or at least that's what he tells me). The client manager pushes so much work on to us, entire team is fed up. Last week, we were asked to work from 7 am to 11:30 pm, pretty much non stop. After lunch at 12:30 pm, the only time I got to eat was at 11:30 pm, nearly 11 hours later. From 5 pm, I didn't even get a chance to get up from my seat. I am pretty sure slaves were given breaks to have food. They treat us lower than slaves. Note that this is in addition to the 8-10 hours I have been working for the last 2 weeks (not counting lunch or other breaks).
- francis-io 6y ago
  I'm sorry for the situation you are in but you allow this to happen. You can vote with your feet and leave. I know its harder for some people, but that's just life. Decisions like this are never easy. If you can't afford to leave then you best be saving all the money you can each month to support you when you do leave. If you can't find another job then you best be training and up skilling to an in demand skill. I'm sorry to be blunt but I hear this same thing all the time, and people just let this happen to them. For what it's worth, I'm a contractor in the UK. I get paid about twice as much a day then a salaried person. I change clients every 3 months to every 2 years. I have 8 months of living expenses in the bank. If a client wants me to do something then fine, but they pay me. I don't get any holiday or benefits, but the extra money makes up for it. Any time off is unpaid, which I feel is how it should be. I had 3 months off at the start of last year when all temp work dried up due to covid, but apart from that, things have been better then ever. Maybe I just have the personality type for this kind of working arrangement, but it seems like a no brainer to me. You come in on a much more equal level with any client or employer. I also think this has the added benefit of forcing interview practice and keeping up to date with marketable skills. I really think it's the anti fragile approach. Please people, take back some contol. Sell your skills at what they are really worth.
matz1 6y ago
In a way Yes, my actual work hour is way less than half of fulltime but yet get paid fulltime salary.
lrvick 6y ago
This is why I switched to being a consultant. I have several clients willing to pay my full rate for as many hours as I want to work but they pay me every month on retainer for a small minimum I know pays the bills, and to make sure they have access to my experience when they really need it even if the minimum hours are not always used every month. If I choose to work a 30 hour week I am paid for 30 hours. Likewise for a 60 hour week. Lawyers figured out this structure ages ago and I feel like more engineers would benefit from doing the same.
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ignoramous 6y ago
One of the most striking contrast between salaried professionals and founders I know is that of Andy Jassy (CEO at AWS) and Jeff Lawson (once a Product Manager at AWS and now CEO and co-founder at Twilio): AWS is probably worth $500B today. Twilio is around 10x less at $60B. Lawson's estimated net-worth is ~$2.5B whilst Jassy's 5x less at ~$450M; and both have been leading their respective businesses since the beginning.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Presumably, there was a lower (perceived) probability of achieving the $2.5B than the $450M. The same as deciding to work for a start up than FAANG.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Furthermore, at that level of wealth, it's pretty much just keeping score. I'm not going to feel sorry for someone with $450M even if, as in Jassy's case, he thoroughly deserves it and more.
ricardobayes 6y ago
Is this some sort of a reverse psychology scheme to make being an employee uncool? In an ideal vulture capitalist world everyone is a contractor and is one bad performance report away from being fired instantly without severance.
motohagiography 6y ago
I avoid salaried roles when I can because the IP ownership rules are way too onerous. They own your brain, all of it, and if you have any creative habits at all, your employer has an option on the output. Fuck that. It's an indenture. The trade-off of salaried roles is the promise of stability and status, and in this day and age, these are both bold lies. You'd think this is the luck of being in a high demand field - except that low-demand and even competitive fields like construction, teaching, and pretty much everything outside white collar corporate work does not have this brain ownership clause. It seems like anything with "status," trades your brain, which is hilarious, because you essentially become corporate property in exchange for some flattery. If you need a job, take one, take the money, and use it to get into a financial position where you have bargaining leverage to own your brain and the freedom to use your own hours.
- granshaw 6y ago
  I’ve managed to get the “we own everything you do off hours” clause stricken out in my last 3 offers. It’s very doable, especially if you’re willing to spend a few hundred bucks and get a lawyer involved
- ip26 6y ago
  I don't love the IP ownership rules, but I feel like it should at least be acknowledged, in tech one of your job functions is literally to create IP. Construction workers and teachers, not so much.
bfung 6y ago
Don’t try doing a startup with contractors - you’ll have to pay someone salary and equity.
omosubi 6y ago
"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary." - Nassim Taleb
DigitallyFidget 6y ago
It depends on the industry and the job or company. Period. There's no universal answer to this except "it depends". At my company, you absolutely work more and get less if you're salary than hourly. Overtime is both common and expected. Hourly will make more than their managers if a year is busy, by a hefty amount sometimes, but they both will work the same amount of hours.
mamon 6y ago
In Europe salaried employees are expected to work 8 hours a day. Anything above that is overtime, and not only it is paid overtime, it actually pays 150% of your normal hourly rate. or 200%, or more, depending on the country.
- Nebasuke 6y ago
  That is certainly not the case in general. It is not the case in the Netherlands, nor is it the case in the UK and Switzerland. Particularly in the Netherlands there are collective working agreements (CAO), which have set up arrangements with the employer that do this for certain job levels, but this is not arranged per law (particularly for higher level jobs). See e.g. https://www.juridischloket.nl/werk-en-inkomen/arbeidsvoorwaarden/overuren-uitbetalen/ https://www.juridischloket.nl/werk-en-inkomen/arbeidsvoorwaa... Similar in the UK, and even more so, the UK did not fully take part of the Working Time Directive when they were back in the EU and allows opt-outs. See e.g. https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours. These opt-outs are often supplied as part of your employment contract. This opt-out has been in all my contracts with my jobs in the UK, although I in practice rarely overworked. Now it is the case both in NL and UK that for most jobs that are "lower" on the job level, there are overtime rates. But both the UK and NL have expectations that "higher" job levels are expected to come with over time. I have not seen any programming job in the UK that pays my overtime. Similarly in Switzerland, a family member of mine used to get paid over time (or be able to take it as PTO), but when they got promoted, it stopped.
bootlooped 6y ago
I think it works out in my benefit. Yes I've done a few late nights and logged on for an hour some weekends to fix something real quick, but those I think are outweighed by all the days I dip out at 4pm if I'm at a good stopping point, or the 1.5 - 2 hour lunches some days. I'm quite happy with the arrangement, especially the part where I can count on my paycheck always being about the same even if I was sick or on vacation that pay period.
emrah 6y ago
> Seeing the comparison, I don’t understand why anyone would go for salaried positions Do hourly employees get any health benefits?

177 points by jasonhansel 6y ago

I saved a significant amount of the money I made as a salaried employee, about $110k in total, over a five-year period. What did I do with it? I bought Tesla stock right after the crash last March, and now I'm retired at age 40. I recently moved out of California into in a luxury apartment in Tennessee, where prices and taxes are low. I am completely free to do as I please. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22970810

nojito 6y ago
So you gambled and got lucky. You really shouldn't assume that your story is the norm.
- maxharris 6y ago
  "Luck" is a way of coping with the fact that someone else did the work required to choose wisely and you didn't. It is especially insidious because it ensures poverty in direct proportion to the extent you rely upon it to guide your actions.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
    What advice do you have for somebody who is yet to retire? Buy a stock which is about to boom?
    - maxharris 6y ago
      If you don't have a lot of money to invest, it's far better to put that cash into developing yourself. That can be as simple as reading books such as The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen or The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, or following an interest you already have (mine are things like machining, chemistry, structural engineering, neon art). If you have a business idea, one of the best books I've read is The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed by Alberto Savoia. Making stuff is a lot easier than learning whether or not you're on the right track without spending everything you have. The last thing I'd suggest is to be concerned with history and America's oncoming fascist trainwreck. Peikoff wrote The Ominous Parallels forty years ago, and his words are every bit as chilling as they are prescient.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 6y ago
        How does any of that relate to investing in Tesla?
        maxharris 6y ago
        Investing intelligently isn't a matter of luck. The ability to think very broadly and deeply helps a lot. Be curious! Read stuff! Don't blindly copy others.
        distances 6y ago
        Tesla in the last year has been a meme stock with valuation that has no connection to reality or any fundamentals. Is this what you predicted with your research?
        maxharris 6y ago
        That’s what you think. I disagree, obviously, which is why I haven’t sold any shares. Why don’t we come back to this in five years? I am pretty sure I’ll still be rich, and you'll come up with more evasions to explain why you aren't.
      - dataangel 6y ago
        > The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand Oh yeah, buying into a cult whose entire appeal is convincing selfish people they can stop feeling bad about it, you're very very developed. Also hysterical that this nose-to-the-grindstone approach is what you're advocating when you retired over a one time return from a super volatile stock.
        maxharris 6y ago
        Let's check back in five years ;) I'm maxharris9 on Twitter
  - DC1350 6y ago
    The luck part is that you could have made the same prediction about lots of different companies that didn’t increase as much as Tesla. I think it’s reasonable to take credit for predicting the direction of the stock, but 10xing your money in a single year is lucky.
  - nojito 6y ago
    It’s “wise” when it works but it’s gambling. Nothing wrong with it but individuals shouldn’t assume that the only way to succeed is by gambling.
- eulers_secret 6y ago
  Agreed, putting all your eggs in one basket like this is just gambling. This person got lucky, but make no mistake anyone else reading this: IT IS STUPID AND YOU WILL PROBABLY LOSE. MOST DO. If you want to do something with your $100K, use it as a house down-payment or consider mutual funds. Or just yeet it into GME, I'm not a financial advisor.
  - maxharris 6y ago
    If you don't know what Williams %R is, can't fathom the concept of normalized average true range, have never studied corporate history in the automotive and computer industries, and have no idea of the effects of monetary policy, you might just be gambling. Fortune really does favor the curious :)
  - WWWWH 6y ago
    More realistically, he was just speaking casually. It’s highly unlikely anyone would be stupid enough to put everything into one stock.
    - maxharris 6y ago
      No, I wasn't speaking casually. https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/1370117445378265088 https://twitter.com/maxharris9/status/1370117445378265088 11.14% Bitcoin, 87.96% TSLA, 0.90% ARKG. NB: this is not investment advice. What worked for me in the past may not work for you now. Do your own research.
syspec 6y ago
Weird flex, but okay
- maxharris 6y ago
  My linked post is timestamped and proved to be quite correct. I actually think it's quite helpful, especially to people that are actually capable of learning from others.
notsuoh 6y ago
Based on your other comments you're attributing your stock pick to an ability on your part and not blind luck like it is. Socrates said that he's better off because he knows nothing and knows he knows nothing, whereas others know nothing but think they know something. Paraphrasing, but this seems applicable to your situation.

twirlock 6y ago

It is when they turn around and try to pretend you're not, i.e. when they try to take away all the consideration for exempt status and treat you like an hourly worker while still milking extra time out of you.

qntty 6y ago

This was the most interesting part to me: The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay. And some places work like that, and when they do it’s mostly fine. When you have that kind of trade-off, that flexibility is a benefit. But at a lot of places, that flexibility is much more one-way. You’re expected to work the company’s standard business hours at a minimum, plus any additional time it takes to get your job done. If you have to work 45 hours one week, that’s just what’s expected of salaried workers. But if you work 36 hours the next week, you’re going to be charged four hours of PTO (or you’re going to get weird looks and questions about why you left at 1 pm on Friday).

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
If someone's backlog goes to zero, their manager can't find more work that needs to be done, and there is no reason that person needs to be available during core working hours, requiring them to sit in the office and kill time is ridiculous. The catch is that for most of us, those conditions are almost never met. When was the last time had a job where the entire backlog of work was cleared out and there were no tasks you could be helping with? Usually if that happens more than a few times, the team is on their way to being reassigned or even laid off. The 40-hour workweek target is best viewed as a feedback loop. If everyone is consistently working more than 40 hours per week, something is wrong. Team size needs to be increased, schedules need to be pushed out, scope needs to be reduced, inefficiencies (meetings!) need to be pulled out of the way. Something has to give. Likewise, if someone is consistently running out of work early, the schedule needs to be brought in, the person should help take pressure off of some other tasks, blockers need to be removed, and so on. The challenge as a manager is that estimation and work-assignment are a two-way process. I work with team members to assign backlog tasks. If someone is consistently taking 20 hours of work for themselves and pretending its a full work week, someone else has to pick up the remaining work.
- busterarm 6y ago
  Our team probably has a 3-5 year backlog of things that could be done, but largely it does not make sense to do them. I only tackle a little bit of it with my idle time each week. Reason being, work that gets done requires code-reviews and often communication and understanding within the organization. I personally might have the bandwidth but collectively as a team and an organization, we do not. And I prefer if my whole team has a little bit of breathing room like this. It means we're rested and prepared to tackle the hard problems and fires that come our way. Nobody burns out. Realistically I don't want anyone putting in more than 32-33ish hours most weeks.

ipnon 6y ago

>The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. So if you work 45 hours one week and 36 hours the next, that’s supposed to be okay. I am satisfied with my salary because I finish my responsibilities in 2 to 4 hours, then spend the rest of the "work day" maintaining a green dot on Slack and promptly responding to merge requests, looking as busy as possible. My coworkers who feel the need to work a certain number of hours (40), invariably work overtime every week because their work expands to fit their perceived availability. They all get paid twice as much as me, but if I'm working half the hours is that equal compensation? I say no, because I still have my hair and my doctor says my blood pressure has improved.

deleted 6y ago
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rubicon33 6y ago
Where do you work where employees who work twice as much, make twice as much? The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner. It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it. To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.
- etothepii 6y ago
  Maybe too many companies have been burned by the undocumented mess left by the "above and beyond" crowd who move on after two years?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago

the_jeremy 6y ago

I don't see any new information in here. Corporations try to maximize profits, individuals try to maximize money and free time. Corporations have more power than an individual when trying to bargain. However, corporations don't really care about hours, they care about your performance reviews (though your performance reviews can be easily colored by how much time your reviewers believe you work). I think it would be interesting to see how many people here spend under 40 hr/wk on their full time job.

donbrae 6y ago
I work 31 hours over four days, which I guess is somewhere between part time and full time. For comparison, the standard, full-time working week here (Scotland) for private- and public-sector office-based jobs is 35 or 37.5 hours. (I choose to work less so I can spend more time on side-projects that make no money.)

bigmattystyles 6y ago

The 40 hour part can be. It’s conveniently ignored by management and many workers have convinced themselves that it’s noble to do more than you’re paid for. Combine that with peer pressure and you get what we have. Personally, I’ve found that in the vast majority of cases, any more than 35-40 hours per week consistently yields diminishing returns, even with busy work. I’ve been fortunate in my life with great management, where I’m on average 40 hours a week, and if I do pull a few 50-60 hours per week, there’s an unspoken agreement that I’ll do a couple 30 hour weeks. But you shouldn’t have to luck out with good management.

sokoloff 6y ago
I’m pretty convinced that if I could have my engineers work 4-5 times 4-5 hours blocks of deep, focused work per week - meaning work that is at the very limit of their cognitive and programming abilities, and do another 8-10 hours of the necessary corporate overhead, that we’d collectively get at least twice as much done per year. One difficulty is that a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit, but even with that set aside, it seems impossible to pivot to such a world with teams beyond a very small total company size.
- b3kart 6y ago
  > a lot of the work that needs doing isn’t anywhere near anyone’s cognitive limit Is this sort of work potentially automate-able?
  - bigmattystyles 6y ago
    Most of them are not even worthy of automation. We waste time doing processes that are orthogonal or were shoehorned in because they worked for another team or division. But I get it, we somehow have to communicate with the remainder of an organization. I guess it’s the least bad of all the alternatives, especially if the system is open to change through reflection.

morpheos137 6y ago

I don't see how it is a scam. You just divide your weekly salary by average number of hours you work per week to get your effective hourly wage. The only scammy thing about it is if the company leads you to believe you will be working 40 hours a week on average and you actually end up working 60. Long work hours is not a good thing regardless if you are salary or hourly. Salary workers typically have greater self direction in how they accomplish their work assignments. In a well functioning workplace NOT having over time compensation as is the case for salary workers can incentivise productivity.

whateveracct 6y ago

i'm sure many newly-remote workers are learning that when they aren't forced to have butts in seats in the office 40hrs/week, there's opportunity to work 20-30hrs/week without consequences - thus hugely increasing their effective hourly wage. so it cuts both ways.

samsonradu 6y ago
Actually 20-30hrs/week might be an overshoot. I'm surprised to see that for a lot of my friends teleworking means about 1h of work per day and an occasional meeting.
- matwood 6y ago
  Now the question is what is 'work', and what is the company paying for? Knowledge work is tricky because it straddles the line between hours worked and knowledge applied. A junior employee might work 10h/day to figure out a problem/get something working/etc... whereas a senior person may solve the same thing in 1h. This isn't the mythical 10x programmer, it's just experience and knowledge coming out when needed. The one with more knowledge also tends to accelerate their acquisition. One, because they can get the work done so quickly, they have time to keep expanding their knowledge. Two, they have all this groundwork knowledge which makes it easier to expand on. So while it may look like your friend only 'works' for 1h/day, you could be missing all the time spent so that your friend could finish the work in only 1h.
  - samsonradu 6y ago
    I follow your point, though knowing more about them I actually incline for a different conclusion. There is a lot of slack in the corporate economy which became more transparent under wfh.
    - matwood 6y ago
      > There is a lot of slack in the corporate economy which became more transparent under wfh. Sure, but that's nothing new. When I was younger I worked in a big corp type job. After a few weeks I noticed this older guy would go play tennis at lunch a few times/week, and then take a nap under his desk afterwards. Normally, he would then leave around 3pm. One day after this happened, I ask someone what's this guys deal. Turns out, he's the only one who knew how to work on system XYZ. Others had some vague idea in case this guy was hit by a bus, but he did 99.9% of the work on this system. Also turns out, it didn't need a lot of work done.

devadvance 6y ago

This could be helpful to some folks. I appreciate the clear distinction between "salaried" and "exempt", as that's something I've seen many folks misunderstand. It's worth noting that, if you're in the United States, minimum salary for exemption also varies by state [0]. For example, as of 2021 in California, for many professions it is now 58k USD. [0] https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/exempt-employees-minimum-salary-requirements-for-2021 https://sbshrs.adpinfo.com/blog/exempt-employees-minimum-sal...

beforeolives 6y ago

> For most salaried people at my company who I’ve spoken to, it sounds like the norm is minimum 45-hour weeks, with bad weeks being as much as 60 hours. Getting breaks or lunches seems rare, if it happens at all, and work can bleed into other areas of your life. This is very specific to the employer and doesn't have much to do with salaries vs hourly. To jump from there to "salaried is a scam" is a bit too far.

jonplackett 6y ago

I’m curious, in the US, is there a link between being salaried and having health insurance? I’m in the UK and our company gives full time employees health insurance but freelancers (the hourly paid workers) not. Is that the not the same in the US? Because that would seem like a big deal.

duxup 6y ago
Very generally, salaried jobs tend to pay better, and include better benefits, flexibility, paid time off, etc. It's not a direct connection that salaried must be better pay and benefits, but it is how it works out most of the time. Also I really question the premise of this article so this 'scam' thing should be taken with a grain of salt, a lot of them.
stonesweep 6y ago
It's based on number of hours worked, rather than hourly vs. salary. The Affordable Healthcare Act defines the number at 30 hours a week for more than 120 days a year where an employer must offer insurance.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  That’s interesting. Thanks. In that case hourly work really does seem better, if you can get it reliably anyway.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    Normally beyond a certain seniority point you become salaried in the uk almost all Managerial or Professional jobs are salaried.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    It’s not all employers though, only those with 50 or more employees.
  - stonesweep 6y ago
    Interestingly, at my company it's based on skill level - everyone works the ~40hr work week, however skill tiers 1-2 are hourly employees and skill tiers 3+ are salaried. On average, the company encourages a healthy work/life balance and > 40 is not normal even for salaried, so it's really specific to how the company staffs their needs.

david-cako 6y ago

Salaries are an information game (that employees aren't winning), so it's limited, the extent that I'm willing to bottleneck my income at whatever Glassdoor/Linkedin horseshit a company is working off of. You can easily quadruple your income doing smart contract work, especially if you can reuse code across projects, whereas for salaried roles, you are mostly going to get incremental raises over your past salaried jobs. There are different ebbs and flows to each type of work, so it's worth trying both for folks to see what they like. Job hopping for raises works for some people, but it also seems to lead to a lot of churn and lower expectations of trust and loyalty for salaried employees in the tech industry. Not my style. A business cutting edge-to-edge with another business is a more reciprocal arrangement, but there are some downsides and more stress.

kradroy 6y ago
As someone who lived on contract work for 5 years the "quadrupling of income" isn't a reasonable metric. Invariably your wage gets diluted. At salaried positions you don't have to deal with: - Clients who pay late - Clients who don't want to pay - Clients who disappear with a large, unpaid bill - Finding clients (ideally ones who don't need cajoling to pay on time) - Self-employment taxes and managing expenses for deductions - Providing your own health coverage and managing the benefits one would get at a full-time position - Being your own safety net during periods of no work - Legal exposure

vmception 6y ago

> To be exempt, you must earn a salary of at least $35,568 and perform relatively high-level work as your primary duties. Just to clarify, this means this is an article about someone making less than $35,568/yr plus overtime that doesn't know how to get an exempt salary that is like 2 - 8 times greater than that? I don't think this debate really applies to any of the American residents, or anybody working for the American companies on this forum. The inflection points where it makes a difference is so low.

cgrealy 6y ago

Don’t work overtime for free. It’s that simple. Sure, the occasional late night or weekend is sometimes an unfortunate necessity, but even then your manager should recognise that and let you take some time in lieu. If you are regularly working 45+ hours a week, your position is under-resourced for what is expected. Talk to your manager. Either the work load needs to reduce, or you need additional people and/or skills/training to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. If nothing is done, leave.

madamelic 6y ago
That's just fine for (software) engineers, but I can't imagine this going well for an employee in a employer's market.
- yetihehe 6y ago
  It depends on where you work. In most of europe, overtime is paid more than normal salary, even 1.5x. If your employer is forcing you to have unpayed overtime, he will have big problems.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Right. It's the same in the US, but if you make over $35,568 your position can be exempt from this. OP is asking if being exempt is a scam.
  - oehtXRwMkIs 6y ago
    If you read the article it talks about exempt vs non-exempt and how salaried workers that make over $35,568 and do "higher-level work" are exempt from overtime. Those that are not exempt get 1.5x pay for overtime and 2x for double overtime (e.g. overtime on holiday). So in the US overtime is always 1.5x but many salaried workers simply don't get overtime.

supernova87a 6y ago

FFS. Which do you want? You want the $ figure and job security of the salaried employee, but not the duties. You don't want to be classified like a contract worker, subject to termination at any time, but you want the flexibility to work when and as you please. You want the freedom to not have your hours monitored, your steps and productivity measured, but not the responsibilities that come with such autonomy. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could create some parallel lalaland universe where normal constraints no longer worked as they do. While we're at it, I want an airplane that's cheap, fast, doesn't use liquid fuel, and doesn't hurt the environment. I think we can all be billionaires.

maxrev17 6y ago
I think being salaried is a scam, so I run my own business. It really is that simple. The choice is there if people are upset about being salaried. Those who are salaried and work 60 hour weeks + commute need to wake up and smell the coffee - if they are moderately good they would make bank self employed.
- virgilp 6y ago
  It's really not that simple. I made a small fortune being salaried. Would I have made the same money self-employed? Maybe, but I'm not sure - the risks are a lot higher (the rewards too, but like I said, far less certain).
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I'm not sure the risks are that high. I mean in a downturn you might see revenue halve, if you work for someone else you might be the unlucky one whose salary drops to zero.
    - virgilp 6y ago
      Yes the risks are not that high, but neither are the rewards. Basically you choose to do something (marketing, sales, dealing with bad clients) over something else (meetings, corporate bullshit, dealing with bad managers). Maybe you get more financial upside on average (especially if you're good at marketing/sales) for slightly less security/peace of mind (as employee if you get sick, or have a child, you still get a salary; you can have paid vacations, etc). Sure, freelancer/consultant is a valid path, but only if you're good at (and enjoy) marketing & sales. Otherwise - you can get lucky to work for a startup that IPOs (or a company whose shares increase dramatically) and end up earning a lot more as salaried.

duxup 6y ago

>Being salaried is often a scam. >Not always. It depends on how a company implements it. But often. I'd really like to see something that backs up this "often" and how many people really work more hours because they're 'expected to' or ... choose to. I'm reminded of OSHA rules that dictate workplace safety. Sometimes it's argued that they're there to keep employers from creating unsafe conditions, but when you read accident reports you find folks willing to take personal risks to the benefit of no one ... all on their own. There are employers who will pressure folks, but IMO a lot of folks who misinterpret / don't deal with what they think are pressures to work more ... and folks who just do it on their own... I think this is all a lot more nuanced and 'often' is presented here without much reason to think that's accurate.

rsj_hn 6y ago
Yeah, for the most part, the point of the OSHA rules is not because employers are forcing the workers to do risky things, but so that employers put processes in place to monitor and prevent their workers from going off and doing risky things. Most people are self-motivated, but they may not be good judges of risk, and a small group of employees go off and do something reckless, get hurt, and now everyone needs to follow safety protocols that reduce risky behavior even if these impose a cost for the 90% that would use common sense and avoid danger. The counterargument is we know something about human nature, so procedures that are dangerous to reckless people is a problem when you are a large business and a given percent of your workforce is going to be reckless.

CuriousNinja 6y ago

This is because the US labor laws are messed up. In other countries, you get paid overtime even if you are salaried.

walshemj 6y ago
Not in the UK and other countries.
- rleigh 6y ago
  Depends on the company. Some certainly do.
  - walshemj 6y ago
    In which country? in the UK its part of the definition. TOIL and on call allowances are not the same as paid OT here.
Gatsky 6y ago
Can verify. In Australia being salaried is definitely superior.
- LilBytes 6y ago
  Anecdote: I'm in Australia, salaried. And I'm getting fucked. 200+ hours over time over the course of last year. 0% pay rise. But we got $1000 stocks pre-tax which equated to a little over 0.6% pay rise. Yay /s I'm voting with my feet though. Should be getting a job offer (hopefully!) in the next few days.
  - Gatsky 6y ago
    Yeah I've done a lot of unpaid overtime as well, don't even bother to count it mostly, what's the point. But being salaried is still superior for the large majority of people. This becomes more evident the older you get, when benefits like maternity/paternity leave, long service leave, paid annual leave etc become more useful. There is also the matter of getting a loan - huge disparity based on employment status there. Another factor is if you fall sick or can't work as usual for some reason. Australia has laws which make it hard to get fired (unfair dismissal legislation), providing even more security to the salaried.

dan-robertson 6y ago

So I feel like this is basically irrelevant to most people. Maybe having hourly pay and overtime is better but it’s generally not a simple choice between exempt or non-exempt employment because the exempt positions tend to be more highly paid and therefore more desirable. Moreover, if you’re an efficient worker, you may feel there are better incentives for you to be paid for that efficiency if you’re salaried. It also feels irrelevant for me (and most people on HN?) because the sort of work I do (computer programming) tends to be salaried. There are self-employed contractors but I feel like they don’t count as they’re also exempt (I think) and they get to choose their rates. When I saw the title I thought it would be comparing employment to contracting or entrepreneurialism. I feel like the things that will have a big impact for compensation are more long-term, discretionary, or growth related (if you’re going to get an x% pay rise every year then your starting pay makes a big difference to the total over all the years), eg promotions/equity/bonuses/switching employers.

dd_roger 6y ago

The premise of the article is incorrect to begin with: > The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours. No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. If I ever have to work over time, then I get one hour of PTO for each hour of OT. I don't know if it's an American thing to assume that all companies must be predatory toward their employees or if it's just the internet populist bubble that favors such content, but neither I nor anyone I know can relate to these kinds of articles.

plorkyeran 6y ago
The work arrangement you are describing is not that of an exempt salaried employee.
cwhiz 6y ago
> No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. That’s not salaried exempt. What you’re describing is closer to hourly pay. However, it’s not a perfect fit because hourly pay is 1.5x after 40.
- dd_roger 6y ago
  My bad, I wasn't familiar with this working arrangement and the vocabulary around it. What I'm describing is simply known as being salaried in my country (not hourly paid as OT is compensated with PTO rather than financial compensation), the vast majority of white collars have such contracts here.
walshemj 6y ago
Your not salaried then ie no fixed hours

didibus 6y ago

Yes it is, but also not really. Basically, you get what you can with the leverage you have. Tech jobs seem to have gotten themselves in a salaried position, and I think that's just the compromise that tech workers were able to negotiate with companies. It be really nice to just clock in and clock out. Not care about how much work is remaining, and operate like a barista, I just show up, serve up some lines of code, a few code reviews, hand out a few estimates and suggest a technical approach to business and then on the dot clock out. If the company feels things aren't going fast enough, they'd need to work harder to not waste my precious clock-in time, keep me busy on the most important things always, or pay me double for extra time. But instead they started to approach employees with the salaried proposition, and some people said yes. So here we are. Now it's not that bad, you need to learn to manage your own time, your own work/life balance. It does mean you can decide what hour to show up to work and when to leave (to some extent). It means your launch break can be twice as long if you want it to be sometimes. It also means that if things aren't going as fast as they need too, it's your responsability to manage your time and commitments better. It's up to you now to make sure you are focused and kept working on the most important thing, that you say no to distractions and make sure the processes favor productivity instead of churn and endless debates. It's up to you to make sure you don't take on work that won't deliver on expectations, and thus up to you to manage those expectations, etc. But it means sometimes you can take more vacation than you technically have to take as long as your manager and team can work them in, etc. The biggest downside to me is that it makes the environment more competitive. Basically how much your coworkers will choose to work will set the standards, and it'll be hard for you to do less. If people start responding to emails at night and on weekends, if people make late fridays the norm, or extra Sunday "catch up on todos" a norm, you kind of have too as well now. So when you have a family and outside commitments I think it gets harder to manage, because you can't easily plan around variable hours, you have a more unpredictable schedule, you don't really know if next month will be extra busy and you'll need to push in to the evenings or if it'll be the opposite, etc.

walshemj 6y ago
"gotten themselves"???? professional jobs have been salaried since for ever.

mkl95 6y ago

Are mandatory, unpaid lunch breaks a scam? 1-2 hour mandatory, unpaid breaks are the norm in my country (Spain). This means even if you WFH (no commute), you will actually spend somewhere between 9 and 10 hours at work every day. Another custom here is doing a few minutes of unpaid overtime every day. If you add both things, a full time employee who works from home spends somewhere between 45 and 55 hours at work every week. Is wage theft still wage theft if it's part of a place's culture? My "hot take" is that it 100% is.

tkiolp4 6y ago
> Are mandatory, unpaid lunch breaks a scam? IMHO, yes.

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notaslave 6y ago

In my experience, as others pointed out, its a one way street. If we work 6 hours a day instead of 8, we will get fired. But if they make us work 15 hours a day, nothing happens to them. I am a salaried/exempt employee working for a client. My employer charges the client per hour, and theoretically, I am allowed to get paid for the extra hours I work. But my immediate manager won't allow it because the budget is allocated for the year, and if I bill extra hours, there will be a shortage of budget (or at least that's what he tells me). The client manager pushes so much work on to us, entire team is fed up. Last week, we were asked to work from 7 am to 11:30 pm, pretty much non stop. After lunch at 12:30 pm, the only time I got to eat was at 11:30 pm, nearly 11 hours later. From 5 pm, I didn't even get a chance to get up from my seat. I am pretty sure slaves were given breaks to have food. They treat us lower than slaves. Note that this is in addition to the 8-10 hours I have been working for the last 2 weeks (not counting lunch or other breaks).

francis-io 6y ago
I'm sorry for the situation you are in but you allow this to happen. You can vote with your feet and leave. I know its harder for some people, but that's just life. Decisions like this are never easy. If you can't afford to leave then you best be saving all the money you can each month to support you when you do leave. If you can't find another job then you best be training and up skilling to an in demand skill. I'm sorry to be blunt but I hear this same thing all the time, and people just let this happen to them. For what it's worth, I'm a contractor in the UK. I get paid about twice as much a day then a salaried person. I change clients every 3 months to every 2 years. I have 8 months of living expenses in the bank. If a client wants me to do something then fine, but they pay me. I don't get any holiday or benefits, but the extra money makes up for it. Any time off is unpaid, which I feel is how it should be. I had 3 months off at the start of last year when all temp work dried up due to covid, but apart from that, things have been better then ever. Maybe I just have the personality type for this kind of working arrangement, but it seems like a no brainer to me. You come in on a much more equal level with any client or employer. I also think this has the added benefit of forcing interview practice and keeping up to date with marketable skills. I really think it's the anti fragile approach. Please people, take back some contol. Sell your skills at what they are really worth.

matz1 6y ago

In a way Yes, my actual work hour is way less than half of fulltime but yet get paid fulltime salary.

lrvick 6y ago

This is why I switched to being a consultant. I have several clients willing to pay my full rate for as many hours as I want to work but they pay me every month on retainer for a small minimum I know pays the bills, and to make sure they have access to my experience when they really need it even if the minimum hours are not always used every month. If I choose to work a 30 hour week I am paid for 30 hours. Likewise for a 60 hour week. Lawyers figured out this structure ages ago and I feel like more engineers would benefit from doing the same.

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ignoramous 6y ago

One of the most striking contrast between salaried professionals and founders I know is that of Andy Jassy (CEO at AWS) and Jeff Lawson (once a Product Manager at AWS and now CEO and co-founder at Twilio): AWS is probably worth $500B today. Twilio is around 10x less at $60B. Lawson's estimated net-worth is ~$2.5B whilst Jassy's 5x less at ~$450M; and both have been leading their respective businesses since the beginning.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Presumably, there was a lower (perceived) probability of achieving the $2.5B than the $450M. The same as deciding to work for a start up than FAANG.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Furthermore, at that level of wealth, it's pretty much just keeping score. I'm not going to feel sorry for someone with $450M even if, as in Jassy's case, he thoroughly deserves it and more.

ricardobayes 6y ago

Is this some sort of a reverse psychology scheme to make being an employee uncool? In an ideal vulture capitalist world everyone is a contractor and is one bad performance report away from being fired instantly without severance.

motohagiography 6y ago

I avoid salaried roles when I can because the IP ownership rules are way too onerous. They own your brain, all of it, and if you have any creative habits at all, your employer has an option on the output. Fuck that. It's an indenture. The trade-off of salaried roles is the promise of stability and status, and in this day and age, these are both bold lies. You'd think this is the luck of being in a high demand field - except that low-demand and even competitive fields like construction, teaching, and pretty much everything outside white collar corporate work does not have this brain ownership clause. It seems like anything with "status," trades your brain, which is hilarious, because you essentially become corporate property in exchange for some flattery. If you need a job, take one, take the money, and use it to get into a financial position where you have bargaining leverage to own your brain and the freedom to use your own hours.

granshaw 6y ago
I’ve managed to get the “we own everything you do off hours” clause stricken out in my last 3 offers. It’s very doable, especially if you’re willing to spend a few hundred bucks and get a lawyer involved
ip26 6y ago
I don't love the IP ownership rules, but I feel like it should at least be acknowledged, in tech one of your job functions is literally to create IP. Construction workers and teachers, not so much.

bfung 6y ago

Don’t try doing a startup with contractors - you’ll have to pay someone salary and equity.

omosubi 6y ago

"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary." - Nassim Taleb

DigitallyFidget 6y ago

It depends on the industry and the job or company. Period. There's no universal answer to this except "it depends". At my company, you absolutely work more and get less if you're salary than hourly. Overtime is both common and expected. Hourly will make more than their managers if a year is busy, by a hefty amount sometimes, but they both will work the same amount of hours.

mamon 6y ago

In Europe salaried employees are expected to work 8 hours a day. Anything above that is overtime, and not only it is paid overtime, it actually pays 150% of your normal hourly rate. or 200%, or more, depending on the country.

Nebasuke 6y ago
That is certainly not the case in general. It is not the case in the Netherlands, nor is it the case in the UK and Switzerland. Particularly in the Netherlands there are collective working agreements (CAO), which have set up arrangements with the employer that do this for certain job levels, but this is not arranged per law (particularly for higher level jobs). See e.g. https://www.juridischloket.nl/werk-en-inkomen/arbeidsvoorwaarden/overuren-uitbetalen/ https://www.juridischloket.nl/werk-en-inkomen/arbeidsvoorwaa... Similar in the UK, and even more so, the UK did not fully take part of the Working Time Directive when they were back in the EU and allows opt-outs. See e.g. https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours. These opt-outs are often supplied as part of your employment contract. This opt-out has been in all my contracts with my jobs in the UK, although I in practice rarely overworked. Now it is the case both in NL and UK that for most jobs that are "lower" on the job level, there are overtime rates. But both the UK and NL have expectations that "higher" job levels are expected to come with over time. I have not seen any programming job in the UK that pays my overtime. Similarly in Switzerland, a family member of mine used to get paid over time (or be able to take it as PTO), but when they got promoted, it stopped.

bootlooped 6y ago

I think it works out in my benefit. Yes I've done a few late nights and logged on for an hour some weekends to fix something real quick, but those I think are outweighed by all the days I dip out at 4pm if I'm at a good stopping point, or the 1.5 - 2 hour lunches some days. I'm quite happy with the arrangement, especially the part where I can count on my paycheck always being about the same even if I was sick or on vacation that pay period.

emrah 6y ago

> Seeing the comparison, I don’t understand why anyone would go for salaried positions Do hourly employees get any health benefits?