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Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 h

Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 hour a week expectation because of these and most of those people were not paid overtime due to 'salary' expectations. Every fast food/retail store manager I have ever spoken to faces this dilemma and all of my friends in 'professional firms' like architecture/law/accounting face this. Tech has been able to avoid it almost certainly only because of how scarce the labor is to begin with. I would assume in 100 years (if we are not all on fire) that tech workers working 40 hours (let alone less) will also be a small minority if we cant get this fixed.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Tightening up rules on exempt employment would be a good step too. Exempt was meant to be just that, an special case exemption for a few high level professionals, not the default for all white collar (and even some blue collar) work. My last job required that I fill out a timesheet each week. On an average day, I assigned hours to about four different time codes. For positions that bill by time such as attorneys and doctors, this might be reasonable but for inhouse software development, it felt a lot more like an hourly job. Even though I was salaried, failing to have 40 hours on my timesheet each week would result in a proportional reduction in pay (there was no increase in pay if I went over 40). I mentioned this to higher ups and was told that it wasn't actually a timesheet, it was so they could determine "resource allocation", which sounded like an flimsy excuse. Using it to track PTO seems reasonable. Using it to track hours at my computer doesn't. This wasn't a small inexperienced company. Its roots go back to the 1940s and it had over 20,000 employees, so they probably knew the relevant labor laws and either were allowed to do this or thought they'd never get called on it. Either way, exempt doesn't seem to mean much anymore other than another way for employers to squeeze employees harder.
whichquestion 5y ago
100 years? It’s already happening today. There are definitely salaried tech workers who are being pushed to work more than 40 hours right now. Some may not know any better, others may feel pressured because they don’t want to look for other work (when they probably should), and so on. These protections would help workers today.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.
- kodah 5y ago
  When my company started standardizing pay I was an SRE. There were no additional benefits for being an SRE despite a massive on-call commitment with highly disruptive false positives that required investigation as we were trying to tune the alerting system. I made the exact same pay as a SWE that never had to do this extra work and were often annoyed if they were paged to act as a SME. This moment is when I transitioned out of SRE work and into SWE work.
mrtranscendence 5y ago
At a contracting firm, I always thought it was annoying to bill hourly but be denied overtime. Luckily it didn't happen often (we worked for the government, what can I say). On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Tightening up rules on exempt employment would be a good step too. Exempt was meant to be just that, an special case exemption for a few high level professionals, not the default for all white collar (and even some blue collar) work. My last job required that I fill out a timesheet each week. On an average day, I assigned hours to about four different time codes. For positions that bill by time such as attorneys and doctors, this might be reasonable but for inhouse software development, it felt a lot more like an hourly job. Even though I was salaried, failing to have 40 hours on my timesheet each week would result in a proportional reduction in pay (there was no increase in pay if I went over 40). I mentioned this to higher ups and was told that it wasn't actually a timesheet, it was so they could determine "resource allocation", which sounded like an flimsy excuse. Using it to track PTO seems reasonable. Using it to track hours at my computer doesn't. This wasn't a small inexperienced company. Its roots go back to the 1940s and it had over 20,000 employees, so they probably knew the relevant labor laws and either were allowed to do this or thought they'd never get called on it. Either way, exempt doesn't seem to mean much anymore other than another way for employers to squeeze employees harder.

whichquestion 5y ago

100 years? It’s already happening today. There are definitely salaried tech workers who are being pushed to work more than 40 hours right now. Some may not know any better, others may feel pressured because they don’t want to look for other work (when they probably should), and so on. These protections would help workers today.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.

kodah 5y ago
When my company started standardizing pay I was an SRE. There were no additional benefits for being an SRE despite a massive on-call commitment with highly disruptive false positives that required investigation as we were trying to tune the alerting system. I made the exact same pay as a SWE that never had to do this extra work and were often annoyed if they were paged to act as a SME. This moment is when I transitioned out of SRE work and into SWE work.

mrtranscendence 5y ago

At a contracting firm, I always thought it was annoying to bill hourly but be denied overtime. Luckily it didn't happen often (we worked for the government, what can I say). On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.