If you are a white collar worker you are a "cadre", a term that is not easily translatable but which roughly means manager. If you are a fresh software engineer

If you are a white collar worker you are a "cadre", a term that is not easily translatable but which roughly means manager. If you are a fresh software engineer from school with 0 direct report, you are already a "cadre", because this is also a kind of status thing. And the way the 35 hours law was applied to cadres is that your contract have a "forfait annuel", meaning you have to work a number of days per year but without any limitation at all in the number of hours per week or days [1]. It also mean you generally can't be paid overtime at all because there is no time limit(except if you work on Sundays maybe). In a previous position, I remember that my contract specified that I had to work 219 days per year, the rest being holidays or RTT. But usually you can work 50, 60, etc hours per full time week. So it does not really feel like you are at 35 hours per week. 219 days is about 44 weeks. 44 weeks * 50 hours / 47 = 46 hours per week on average + 5 week of paid leave. From my knowledge, this is far more generous that what American companies are offering to their employee, but this is far cry from effectively working 35 hours per week. [1] European law specify that you can't work more than 48 hours per week (with exceptions for executives, etc) and have a minimum rest time between 2 days of 11 hours, but this is rarely enforced in enterprises.