Posted on 05/02/2015 3:48:34 AM PDT by Dallas59
When you're hired for a full-time job, the understanding is that you'll put in at least a 40-hour workweek.
The expectation -- especially for salaried employees who don't qualify for overtime -- is that you'll put in more to ensure your projects get done.
Or because the boss needs something at the last minute.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
If that were true in Oregon they wouldn’t need a specific exemption. Not sure about other States.
At one point, I had a boss who would do nothing all day, then at 4:00, he'd get busy. I was expected to stay over to complete the work while he took off for home and family. He and others had the attitude that as a single person, I had no life, so I could work 24/7. When I complained, I was told, “but you're being paid overtime.” That wasn't the point.
Eventually, all that work damaged my health. There were a number of factors besides the stress, but I developed heart disease culminating in a cardiac arrest in 2008. Complications ensued and then I couldn't work anymore.
My sister-in-law puts in a lot of overtime and is under an extreme amount of stress. I worry that one day she will end up like me. It's just not good to work yourself to death, no matter how well you are compensated.
It takes me 4 minutes to powersmoke a Lucky Strike. I would be massively more productive if I could just smoke in the office and a coffee maker was bolted to my desk.
I put "work" in quotations because the word implies drudgery. I like what I do. I don't consider it "work". Mowing my lawn or unloading the dishwasher is "work." Generating business and new revenue streams for my company is not. It's how I make my living and provide my family with a well above average lifestyle. I always felt that the "40 hour work week" or "8 hour day" had socialist implications to it. I also consider it demeaning to punch a clock, fill out a time sheet, or have a "supervisor" hovering over me. I prefer to be accountable to myself and I am my own most demanding boss.
I'm a self-starter. I never "call in" sick. I never make excuses or whine or complain. I like the feeling of getting a large bonus check for exceeding my revenue and profit plans. I also like having the responsibility over my own P&L statement and running my own operation/department.
I am employed at a large corporation. I see all the office drones stampeding the doors at the 5 o'clock hour so they can sit in traffic for an hour. I also see them sitting in the parking lot in the morning because they don't want to come into the office even one minute before their shift. So afraid they might be giving an extra minute or two to "the Man" without "compensation." Those people are dead-ending their own lives and careers.
“I’m going to ride the biggest wave I can to get as far up the ladder as I can before I get to that “middle age” where the younger prospects can outperform me.”
Friend, if you are doing the same work as younger prospects by the time you are “middle aged” you are doing it wrong, or you have the wrong job now.
It’s all “urgent”, and everything is special. Not. I average out to less than 40 in a salaried job - in IT. For programming, 3 hours at a stretch is about my limit. Measure twice , cut once.
> I’m going to ride the biggest wave I can to get as far up the ladder as I can before I get to that “middle age” where the younger prospects can outperform me.
Younger people will never outperform an older person unless the job involves physical stuff.
Using a one friend in the field of many as an example, please explain what good ‘generous compensation’ does for a person, disregarding effects on the body from either long hours or abuse, when that person wakes to work, arrives home so late from work it’s bedtime and, with regularity, ends up getting contacted for work on days-off...
I haven’t seen one friend in 2 years, he’s so jammed up. He swears he’d quit in a heartbeat, as it’s killing him, but it pays the mortgage. (I’m not even going to get into the worker visa threat to careers)
The irony is he doesn’t have the free personal time to enjoy absolutely anything he has the $$ to buy.
And no life.
And aging twice as fast as I.
A wise man once gave me some advice I too-easily dismissed in my youth: Work to live; don’t ‘live to work’...I refuse to return to IT as a profession and am on career #3 (my last). Another wise man told me ‘have not one career, but 2. I’ve got that covered now.
The ‘computer’ exemption during the genesis of the internet & computers may have made sense, but now it’s simple sweatshop-rules, hypocritically propped up by politicians & bureaucrats that crow ‘fair labor standards’ for everyone else...just not for IT...because of the exemptions.
.02
(I make these comments in support of those in IT/programming and against liberal hypocrites demanding sweatshop labor out of those that make our evolving economy possible while simultaneously making it easier to replace those salaries/positions with Hindis et al, whether direct or outsourced)
Promotions end when you are about 45 as do big salary increases. You’ve got only about 20-25 years to get where you’re going and then the door slams shut. You thinking correctly about this. It’s ultimately a personal choice about how far you want to go and where you want to be.
The headline is stupid and misleading. The article has nothing in it at all about “the end of the 40 hour week.”
“Of the more than 1,200 adults surveyed, 21% said they worked 50 to 59 hours while 18% said they worked 60 or more. Another 11% estimated 41 to 49 hours.”
I would have to say all this is based on the personal debt.
Oh, come on. I have to do overtime because the avalanche on my desk every single day can’t be done by one person in an eight hour work day, and I do overtime because tomorrow’s avalanche will be just as big, or bigger. And it’s all timely. Ask for help? Sure, try that sometime. HR will ask why you’re so poor at your job that you can’t do it yourself. Ask a coworker, and suddenly they are too busy. Only those who supervise think there is no need for overtime.
After I retired for good, I found a couple of part time jobs, neither of which gave me 20 hours.
I always thought that a forty hour work week was something dreamed up by Utopians. Kinda like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Younger people will never outperform an older person unless the job involves physical stuff.
” I have to do overtime because the avalanche on my desk every single day can’t be done by one person in an eight hour work day, and I do overtime because tomorrow’s avalanche will be just as big, or bigger.”
I was in defense. Defense companies are overstaffed in an attempt to run up the project costs. Private companies sometimes understaff and use overtime because of the high associated costs of hiring, like insurance and Unemployment insurance (which is really just another tax.)
The risk they run is employees will be looking for a better job. So, they’ll train somebody who then leaves.
I’m 35 now and finally feel like I’m being noticed for what I do. I am on the cusp of being promoted into an IT architect role which is the top of the tallest mountain I figured I’d climb in my career. The thing with climbing those mountains, there are always higher ones just within view from the top.
I am starting to see younger prospects (<25) come into Tier III-level engineering, but many of them lack motivation or discipline. They only want to work on the exclusive projects using the big toys and don’t want to work in the trenches on things like work orders and paperwork for change control. Then they often despise people like me despite over 20 years of applied, practical IT knowledge and 9 years of undergraduate and graduate work. Oh, and not to mention over 3 years of coursework and preparation for certifications in networking, operating systems, and security.
I’ll work for as long as I can, and yes, I completely understand that I’m working to make someone else money; but I genuinely and truly LOVE what I do. I love everything about what I do to the point that my hobbies revolve around it. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I honestly couldn’t think of a job I’d rather be doing.
I’m 35 now, and I’ve been busting my ass working 50+ hour weeks for about 10 years. I’m okay with it. When I was growing up, I had men in my life who were much better than I ever will be. These were men with callouses on their hands, missing limbs from wars, standing on their feet for 40+ hours a week in factories and mills. For me to be where I am, making the money I’m making, for the amount of work I feel I actually do, I’m content.
At one point in my youth, straight out of college, I had a dollar figure in my head for what I thought would be “the pinnacle” of my career. I surpassed that number in less than 5 years. Now I’m close to bringing down enough money that my wife could quit her job (which I know she won’t do), and I know I still have a ways to go.
The problem with articles like this one are that they espouse this idea that everyone should only have to work 40 hours to make ends meet. Truth is, you’ll never find a millionaire or a billionaire who got their start by sitting around lamenting how they have to work 50+ hours a week to make ends meet. They wanted more. They had a drive for it. They wanted to move up quickly and acquire wealth and power and status. Some of us just want to be comfortable and have nice things while doing what we enjoy, and it pisses us, me, off that we have these societal cancers who feel like work the bare minimum or even less or even not at all somehow entitles them to berate me for the amount of work, the amount of effort, the amount of drive I have to move up and up in this world.
Screw the takers! I’m going to bust my ass for as long as I can to make sure I am comfortable in my old age. White, black, Asian, hispanic, whatever... EVERYONE can make it if they want to. The drive has to be there. America provides the opportunity.
“Lol...Never gonna happen.”
It can. Not to say it will but it sure can. It’s all a
matter of incentive. You take that away and whats the
reason in doing any more than what you have to. The
other side is a government mandate on a maximum hourly
work week. And finally, taxation. Tax any income from
overtime 80% or more. Of course most of this would be
unconstitutional but so is Obamacare and gun regulations.
The sad fact is the day the government was able to tax
us individually is the day the bill of rights was suspended.
Not all IT jobs are exempt from overtime. Bench techs that do computer and printer repair and are under constant supervision would fall in that category. If your a server or network admin mostly, it fairly safe to say your exempt from overtime rules..
“...No excuse for 60+ hour work weeks without overtime just because it’s IT...”
Another IRS rule that specifically includes IT contractors — there is an IRS rule that says (in brief), if you have to travel (week to week or whatever) to the client site for your IT contract, at the point you become aware the travel required by the contract will cover longer than a year (365 days), then your home of record becomes the client site for tax purposes and any travel per-diem you receive for travel expenses is taxable income. Note that it doesn’t change at the one year mark - it changes at the point you learn travel for the contract will exceed one year.
Had some contractors on my team get caught unexpectedly by that one on a commercial sector project. It only applies when you are getting a flat per-diem rate for your travel expenses (usually just food, but could include lodging & transportation) without having to provide receipts. If you are reimbursed penny-for-penny with receipts, it does not apply.
The reasoning we got was that if you get per-diem rate for food, you could bank some of that money by eating cheaper and it does not matter if it is a govt or commercial sector gig. They just can’t bear the thought that you might figure out how to bank some of that per-diem, even if you choose to stock up on peanut-butter and tuna instead of steak restaurants every night.
And if you are taken off the contract for a period of time and put back on it, the clock does not reset — if it’s under the same contract. That was described as “an illegal tax avoidance strategy” and you could be penalized with fines or prosecution.
The solution at the time was to increase their per-diem to where it would cover the estimated taxes and I have no idea how they figured the extra amount.
Totally understand that. Liberals are sick in the head. How we let them take the discussion on this is beyond me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.