Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
When I was younger, I was very excited about the idea of going from being an hourly employee to being a salaried employee. Getting a salary instead of wages meant you were Getting Up There!
Nope.
Getting a salary instead of wages means you get a constant amount no matter how many hours you put in, so your corporate overlords can feel comfortable asking you to overwork yourself for no additional compensation.
@noelle Your work contract doesn't set a fixed number of weekly hours? Over here (Belgium) the de facto standard for salaried employees is to work 38h per week; overtime is either paid separately or converted to paid days off, or both.
@noelle And to think that many european CS/IT students and professionals dream of going to the US and work there. We seem to have it way better at home, between legal protections and market asymetry.
@elomatreb @noelle Haha yes, but that's mostly because VC in Europe are way less... how to word it politely... enthusiastic than their American counterparts.
@jkb @noelle UK is sort of halfway between rest of Europe/USA, although working outside of EU limit is more common than in some other countries (its unclear what happens after Brexit) but even before EU directive you either got separate overtime or paid time off.
I work as head of IT for 24/7 healthcare org so could be called at any time but the nurses do not call me at odd hours for minor things (only if *major* issues occur with patients database or other critical systems, not very common)
@noelle @jkb There is actually a legal standard for this, it just sucks.
https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17a_overview.htm
At least the law was updated in 2016 to raise the floor from $455/wk to a minimum of 40th percentile of full-time non-hourly worker wages in the lowest wage Census Region ($913 as of 2016), and with automatic update provisions starting in 2020.
But that's still really low for a lot of areas, tbh...
And, the Highly Compensated Employees rule was updated the same way, and is now $134,004.
@jkb There's no legal standard in the US and companies will routinely exploit this. It's especially true in the software-development industry, where 7-day, 100-hour "crunch weeks" aren't uncommon but don't draw any extra pay.