What actually happened was that I studied like a demon until I qualified to work as a contract programmer - where I was paid hourly, and was never particularly expected to work excessively.

Given the pay that coders typically make I don't think it's unreasonable that we are exempt from overtime pay however that should not be regarded as carte blanche to demand we work as many hours as the management asks us to.

One other possibly sneaky area is when companies shift to unaccrued or "unlimited" vacation and the company puts a culture in place that discourages using that vacation. I'm fortunate to currently work in a place where the unavoidable crunch times are followed by vacation my manager almost forced me to plan to avoid burnout.

from http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_overtime.htm

If you are paid a salary, the regular rate is determined as follows:

Multiply the monthly remuneration by 12 (months) to get the annual salary. Divide the annual salary by 52 (weeks) to get the weekly salary. Divide the weekly salary by the number of legal maximum regular hours (40) to get the regular hourly rate.

The idea being, I think, that working 120 hours deserves additional compensation, whether you have a week to recover or not, and companies can't game overtime by giving you vacation days to recover. They would be better off just having you work regularly.

This is a very dangerous argument to make. It's the same sort of argument that makes people turn a blind eye to the wage-collusion class action. Just because we're slightly better paid than average doesn't mean labor protections don't apply to us.

Having "no fixed hours of work" is a social class signifier in many cultures.

But you are right some one getting paid 250k is still a worker and does have "labor" issues just as some one on 25k does.

Obviously issues may present in different ways for high and low paid workers

On the other hand, there are also high-status professionals, like lawyers, who bill by the hour.

I think one advantage of being paid for every hour of work you do is that whoever is paying you is going to be less likely to burn overtime hours on meaningless things. For example, that arbitrary end-of-month deadline you're working on doesn't look nearly as urgent to the business if they need to pay for the night and weekend hours required to meet it. If the company knows that each of your hours is valuable, they might even treat you with more respect.

There is also a LOT of sharp practice in legal billing

For argument's sake, let's say you're paid $80K per year. On the one hand, you may think that is high (it always depends what your frame of reference is). If the code you produce directly makes the company millions of dollars though, does that change your assessment of the 'reasonableness' of that salary?

This is the argument I've heard as to why sports stars get paid so much (because you have to look at what they get paid vs the amount of money they're making for the comapnies paying them).

It's a real can of worms.

Edit: 1,259,520$ (March 31, 2015) http://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyet.php?code=GOOG

In 2014 Apple had a pretax income of 53.48B and 92,000 employees. It could give them all a 200,000$ / year pay bump and still make 35Billion in profits.

PS: Not that any company thinks this way, but it's not hard to argue that top programmers are underpayed.

So they could presumably pay everyone $250K more than they do now and still be marginally profitable.

I was one in 1989. So were many of my coworkers. Someone told me that Apple employed so many contractors so that it could inflate the ratio of revenue to employees.

Hiring more contractors doesn't make a company any more money but it does help inflate the stock price in a purely artificial way.

The main point I want to put across is that it's unfortunate that as software engineers, we have somewhat of a tendency to feel guilty for what we do earn and as a whole profession we can be prone to underselling our own value. I find the parent comment a perfect reflection of this tendency.

I recall one of my coworkers at BT commenting well that he was taking Friday off to play Golf as he was using up his TOIL.

If they are treating you as hourly paid you should be getting OT.

Employers can "demand" a lot whether its justicable is another matter.

And a manager requiring attendance at say a 9 o'clock meeting is not the same as require you to be in the office 9-5 5 days a week

Oh, puleeez. I doubt you meant it so broadly, but this comes across as having a very insular view of the tech landscape. There's really no "wage insecurity" for a decent engineer in NYC, DC area, Seattle, Boston, Raleigh-Durham, etc. etc. either (sorry if I left your awesome tech hub out..).

If anyone finds themselves in a 20h/day situation and can't find a local alternative, then you'll need to move or find a remote gig. 140h/week might happen for short sprints, but if it's sustained then you're a fool for staying.

The finance guy reminded me that I was on a daily rate and would be paid per calendar day of work, and it wasn't possible to get more than 1x the rate.

So I started to claim a days work every time I got a call on the weekend. Someone calls me on the weekend and I say "hit reset" or "send me an email and i'll fix it on monday"? I worked. I'm claiming my daily rate.

Those days were begrudgingly paid and I suspect it all evened out in the end.

I'm just noting that creating a California wide over/under for overtime is going to result in some discrepancies.

Everyone making less then the 80k mentioned were switched from salary employees to hourly. This would have been good if we all spent nights and weekends crunching code. It was quiet the contrary. No one worked overtime so now everyone's pay has been reduced.

We used to have flexible hours and still get paid our full salary. Now you have to make sure you clock out at lunch and God forbid if you take more than an hour.

Sometimes we are done with all our tasks but we still have to sit at our desk to complete our 8 hours if we want to get paid our old salary pay.

This worked to the advantage of the employer, not us.

I would never accept having my pay downgraded without good reason or having to suddenly endure less flexible work hours. My general rule is: pay & benefits are only supposed to improve, as soon as either one degrades, it's time to look for another job. And job prospects in IT are pretty good right now, at least in the US.

What happened to you happened to a friend of mine, and he refused to leave the job. Salaried to hourly. Then leave changed from sick leave being something you could take easily to requiring it to be dire circumstances and a doctor's note. This past year they changed their pension plan from X% per year of service to Y% (Y < X). Seriously, if a company is willing to cut one benefit, they'll find a way to cut the rest unless there's enough unrest (and even then, most seem to prefer going bankrupt and getting bought out).

edit: it ain't a daycare.

I much prefer to (and currently do) work salary. I like being able to go home early when I finish my workload ahead of schedule, just like you. And I'm fortunate enough to have an employer that doesn't demand more than 40 hours even if the workload is high. But when it comes to employers taking advantage of and exploiting their employees, a salary structure can be far more exploitative than hourly wages.

Now, for hourly workers, reducing them to part-time and hiring twice as many people as you needed if they were full-time, so you can avoid having to provide the benefits that are required for full-time workers (health insurance, etc) -- THAT is the way to expoit hourly workers. Not making them sit at a desk twiddling their thumbs in order to get an extra hour of pay, that's not exploitation at all. I'd be thanking my employer for letting me do that if I were you.

As people have said, if the employer refuses to pay an hourly worker overtime when they've worked the overtime hours then there are labor law issues (which means that the employee must be paid overtime). But I do know employers can ask/assert that an hourly employee is not to exceed a certain amount of hours per week. If an employer refuses to pay a salaried employee overtime then that's where this article comes in and what people are discussing in the other comments.

If an employee refuses to work overtime then that mostly deals with workplace culture, pleasing your boss/your personal decision/getting your work done. There's a big difference between why or how an hourly employee can or would refuse to work overtime vs a salaried employee as explained by the way they're paid. An hourly employee mostly deals with not getting paid more money whereas a salaried employee most likely worries about a bad relationship with the boss/company.

I suppose everyone has the right to refuse overtime (not sure if there are legal foundations for this) but since the US has a work-as-much-as-possible kind of mindset it's difficult to simply refuse overtime.

Source: Buott, Kyle, Larry Haiven, and Judy Haiven. "Labour Standards Reform in Nova Scotia." (2012). pp 12-13.

http://www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads...

Companies hate the publicity.

Overtime is mandated at 1.5x normal hourly wage, but that doesn't kick in until you reach 48 hours, there are also exceptions, which include programmers. However, the minimum wage act still applies, which means you're only entitled to 1.5x minimum wage for every hour you work above 48 hours a week.