> This company has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make workers whole ... We are particularly pleased that LinkedIn also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance.
I'm surprised they're getting praised so much for complying. It's not like they had a choice.
Instead of commending them on their newfound diligence, we should be asking why and how these overtime violations occurred in the first place. Was it a systemic problem with lower management incentives? How far up did knowledge of the violations extend? Why wasn't it detected until now, and what can we do to prevent it from happening elsewhere, not just within LinkedIn?
There is a cynical and pessimistic interpretation (just an idle thought; I know nothing at all): the investigators are stretched thin, so instead of investigating anything themselves, they instead ask LinkedIn to investigate itself. LinkedIn slaps itself a little bit, writes a report, agrees to a settlement, maybe manages to soften some language or push its own interpretation of events, "we did this, this and this, but we never ever did any of that".
The investigators never had enough resources to do an investigation on their own, they check that LinkedIn's report is roughly as stern as their own report would have been based on evidence and interpretations presented in LinkedIn's report and what investigators already knew, agree to a settlement. The outcome is that LinkedIn is "punished" and investigators look like they are doing their job.
does it really matter when they did the thing in the first place?
It's like congratulating a car thief for being an upstanding citizen because they admitted to the thievery and promised never to do it again after paying a fine.
It could very well have been an unintentional violation of the rules. A few bad habits here and there turn into a cultural practice before anyone notices, everyone assumes that someone else must be in charge of enforcing compliance with that particular rule and that mythical someone must know something they don't that makes the rule breaking okay, somehow. It's easy to do. Never ascribe to malice what can be covered with stupidity, etc. And don't forget that the people suffering from this rule violation and the ones who were supposed to be enforcing it could be the same people - companies are made of people.
"This accidental car thief has shown a great deal of integrity by fully cooperating with investigators and stepping up to the plate without hesitation to help make the car owner whole ... We are particularly pleased that the car thief also has committed to take positive and practical steps towards securing future compliance." -- nobody, ever.
Let's be honest here: the prosecutors are praising them because corporate regulatory capture is so deeply embedded within our regulatory institutions. NOT because it was unintentional.
I can't really bring myself to believe that it wasn't intentional either.
You get the same kind of "let's let 'em down easy" speak from the SEC & from the Federal Reserve toward the banks. Hell, you even get it from the courts when it's a rich white guy indicted for a DUI or snorting cocaine.
If an hourly employee checks and responds to email in the evening on their phone then they are probably "on the clock" and need to be paid for it. How many companies enforce that? Probably not a lot. It's very easy for me to imagine the situation that Kluny described.
If employees are trusted with discretion about when they work, and the company benefits from flexible work hours (responding to email at home), then the solution of course is for employees to be salaried.
I don't see why not. It is about as easy for a company like linkedin to commit accidental wage theft as it is for a black guy in the 'hood to accidentally steal a car.
>If employees are trusted with discretion about when they work, and the company benefits from flexible work hours (responding to email at home), then the solution of course is for employees to be salaried.
The point being that this solution is SO simple and obvious that not implementing it couldn't possibly have been an accident.
Companies like LinkedIn don't make 'mistakes' like this that benefit their employees to the tune of $6m. Ever.
The company is still responsible for that, it doesn't mattter why.
Do you think that consumer cares if the lack of PCI compliance caused them to have their CC information stolen and used because someone internally thought someone else was responsible for PCI compliance?
If you choose to store CC information it's your responsibility to make sure you're PCI compliant, if you employ people, it's your responsibility to make sure they get paid.
Since we're going with car analogies, it's more like a company leases a fleet of vehicles where each vehicle can be driven up to 20,000 km/year for the price negotiated. However, the cars don't have odometers to keep track of distance traveled. The dealership who leased the cars thinks that they've been driven further and complains to the Department of Transport. The DoT investigates and adds up third-party records of everywhere the cars have been and finds out that some vehicles were routinely driven more than 20,000 km in the prior year. The company agrees to pay the agreed-upon rate for any overage distance per vehicle plus a proportional fine and also agrees to add an odometer to the vehicles to track actual mileage in the future.
Bad analogy. The rights / obligations are upside down.
The company leasing the fleet of vehicles was responsible for installing the odometer.
In LinkedIn's case, the company was obligated to account for the hours worked (which presumably the employees reported correctly, since the employees won the case).
It's in the Gov's best interest to praise LinkedIn for their investigation, because a) there is no reason NOT to (other than moral pontificating), and b) it creates goodwill for any future cooperation they need from LinkedIn.
I'm not apologizing for LinkedIn, with 5400 employees you'd expect them to have people that know the laws.
But, ... Most small businesses don't know the laws. I worked at a company that threatened to doc pay if people didn't show up for "core hours". My understanding though IANAL is that if they did that we'd instantly become non-exempt because docking pay by hours makes us not salaried. They can fire you if you're not doing the job they want but they can't pay based on hours worked as part of the definition of "salaried" is that you set your own hours and get paid a fixed salary. (if someone knows if that's incorrect please correct me)
"ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it" is fine an dandy when laws amounted to "don't physically hurt people and don't steal their stuff".
There are so many laws on the books (statutory and administrative) that is is not remotely possible to follow them all. FFS, there are 40,000 words regulating the sale of cheese. Nobody knows how many laws there even are ESTIMATES range up to 300,000 different laws. But nobody knows for sure http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230431980...
I'm also going with the thought that it's possible they did attempt to responsibly follow the law; but like many laws it's a complicated mess that almost everyone is in non-compliance without realizing it.
This looks to me like a cultural problem, not only in the IT sector but in all sectors where high performance is a measurably inductor to profit. I hope this case sets a precedent and will lead to employees whistle-blowing organisations where overtime goes untracked and unpaid.
It's ridiculous that employees would work their guts out for companies that they don't hold significant shares in without receiving even normal hourly pay.
Uh, it was because LinkedIn was guilty of overtime of non exempt employees. I find that in most shops I have seen nearly everyone is exempt. I record hours per day for my work, I am fully exempt.
Many in the tech industry will voluntarily put in excessive hours and this causes pressure on others to do similar, unless within a protected class of workers.
To me it begs the question why there is an exempt class? To me its like saying some people are exempt from the realities that inform the 40 hr work week. Things like productivity research, health and wellness research etc.
Not every job is based around clocking in and clocking out, though, and there are a lot of complications for things like traveling, lunch meetings, and business trips. There are also strict laws about overtime pay and the max time that a person is allowed to work before being required a break. There's also the issue of employees recording their own times worked (it's a compliance nightmare that can lead to lots of payment adjustments, fines, and/or lawsuits).
Of course not all jobs are based around clocking in and clocking out production line style. However, that knowledge informs when the hours are performed, not the quantity of hours.
If your job duties are flexible and can be performed at anytime, why not pay "overtime" when someone has to work 60 hrs a week to cover their duties (or not get "let go" due to appearances) ?
Dont get me wrong, I know ahead of time that I will be required to work more than 40 hrs a week and thus price it into my salary, making the overall points a little moot in practice. But, there is something odd, a smell of sorts, about saying "You get your salary for 40 hrs a week, and the other 20 are not paid" ...
Say I would only work for $30 an hour, and I know the employer is going to require 60 hrs a week of work, then I'd only settle for a salary that is 3000*30 = $90k a year. If the employer has a standard that says "I will pay you for overtime" then I can accept a salary of 60k a year and know that I will make $30k in overtime pay.
The real hard part comes when the work is presumed the later and is the former in reality. One takes a wage on the presumption of 40 hrs a week and ends up working 60.. decreasing their compensation for time by 33% .
As I've put in my other comment elsewhere I got hit with a DOL action many years ago. It definitely wasn't willful but we were running afoul of some hidden rule that even some lawyers had never heard of and didn't know about. One employee complained, they investigated and audited, and we got fined and had to pay back wages. I'm not commenting on why or what linkedin did only providing perspective that it can happen for less nefarious reasons.
I'm curious about your story. Did the employee not complain to management prior to involving DOL? If the employee did, what happened that the employee's complaint was not accurately assessed and resolved? And if the employee did not, do you have an idea of why?
I mean these as honest questions. The law is complicated, and it's easy to accidentally run afoul of some provision somewhere while acting in good faith. Outside of retribution, it's preferable to resolve these situations amicably. It's faster for the employee and less risky for the business. So when I hear these kinds of stories, I like to identify where the breakdown happened. Was it a bad hire? A broken reporting process? A failure of the lawyers to assess the claim?
"Did the employee not complain to management prior to involving DOL?"
Definitely not. Was a small company so I would have known.
"And if the employee did not, do you have an idea of why?"
I think they were probably upset about something else. One interesting thing was the DOL office was a mere 2 blocks from our office. Perhaps that played into it.
Interesting perspective. It's unfortunate that you can get bit even when trying to play fair. Even if LinkedIn's mistake was similarly unwitting, we should try to learn something from it. Maybe the rules have become too complex, or maybe more guidance is needed to help employers stay within the lines.
I don't get it. So if I'm working overtime for my employer, a lot, I'm entitled to money?
I get that my work after hours is essentially "free" labor. But I wasn't aware that there are actually laws that say salaried employees are entitled to more compensation when working after hours.
The FLSA requires that covered, nonexempt employees be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour for all hours worked, plus time and one-half their regular hourly rates for hours worked beyond 40 per week.
With few exceptions, to be exempt an employee must (a) be paid at least $23,600 per year ($455 per week), and (b) be paid on a salary basis, and also (c) perform exempt job duties. These requirements are outlined in the FLSA Regulations (promulgated by the U.S. Department of Labor). Most employees must meet all three "tests" to be exempt.
An employee who meets the salary level tests and also the salary basis tests is exempt only if s/he also performs exempt job duties. These FLSA exemptions are limited to employees who perform relatively high-level work. Whether the duties of a particular job qualify as exempt depends on what they are. Job titles or position descriptions are of limited usefulness in this determination. (A secretary is still a secretary even if s/he is called an "administrative assistant," and the chief executive officer is still the CEO even if s/he is called a janitor.) It is the actual job tasks that must be evaluated, along with how the particular job tasks "fit" into the employer's overall operations.
Generally managers, engineers, and most salaried office jobs are "exempt". Lately more focus has gone towards defining who exactly is an exempt vs non-exempt salaried employee in white collar office jobs.
California law makes it a lot harder to exempt programmers via this route - roughly speaking if you're a salaried programmer in CA making less than $85k a year you are actually NOT exempt from overtime. I know of a lot of startups that run afoul of this but thankfully for them their employees are unaware.
Edit - IANAL of course, but all research I've been able to find on the subject indicates this is likely true. The statute of limitations is 4 years I think, so there's a lot of back-pay that can accumulate in this sort of situation. Keep in mind that in CA overtime is defined as 1.5x for hours that exceed 40 in a week or 8 in a day, and 2x for hours that exceed 12 in day. Even if you only work 40 hours a week if you occasionally pull a long day or all-nighter you are supposed to be receiving overtime.
The amount of time it takes to complete work for a commit is highly variable. I've had commits take a few minutes up to a day's worth of work when debugging something complex. A simple mean time per commit seems like a poor metric.
Sure, but you're obviously working at the point you commit. For example, if my first commit of a day is at 9:15 AM and the last one is at 7 PM, odds are pretty high I've exceeded the 'allowed' 9-to-5 hours.
Well, we do a lot of work outside of what our commits show, but that sort of thing would be useful to at least form an estimate. But if you are in the position of the employee claiming that you worked say 50 hours a week for two years, it is the company's responsibility to have your hours accounted for over that whole period. Practically they cannot produce that kind of information and your assertion will probably stand.
Yep, most HN readers are probably exempt due to the "computer employee" exemption:
> Computer Employees: Those who work in computer-related occupations, for example computer systems analysts, computer programmers and computer software engineers, are exempt as long as their work involves a combination of primary duties that include applying systems analysis techniques and procedures, consulting with users to determine specifications, and designing, developing, analyzing, creating, testing and modifying computer systems and programs.
Edit: State laws sometimes offer more protection, e.g. California, for non-high salary professionals.
Reading the DoL's advisory on this [1] suggests that it all hinges on the concept of blue-collar vs. white-collar or production vs. staff employees. I can only imagine that the 'production' employees are seen as more interchangeable and largely incapable of having multiplicative effects on the company's business model. A programmer or accountant who's getting a raw deal can find a better job (where better means pay commensurate with contributions), but a tier 1 help desk tech or factory worker will likely have a lower ceiling on possible pay to begin with, and (more) trouble finding a way to secure compensation that scales with corporate success.
It is surprisingly hard to find explanations for this - the web is choked with articles explaining who's exempt and who's not, but not so many with justifications or reasoning or historical context.
A third reason might be the argument from market power stemming from the fact that if you can personally create $10 million of cold hard cash value using nothing but a bit of time in front of a computer, and with no long-term detrimental effects on you of any kind, then the fact that you are minting money creates a seller's market (just as there will always be a seller's market for legal currency), and it [might be an argument for] allowing you to work whatever hours you wanted - or sleep in the office, be offered legal drugs, whatever. if you didn't like it you could go somewhere else.
it's very different if you were cleaning staff at any of the same companies. they "need" more protection than you do!
Edit: from your responses it is clear that many people it applies to should also be owed overtime. I was just throwing out one "logical reason".
In addition I've thought of the crazy hours residents and doctors put in - so that high earnings / value add might not guarantee that much market power, if the conditions are the same at all hospitals.
on the other hand much of computer labor is absolutely in a seller's market (from the point of view of the employee) and clearly does not need the same level of protection. there is a lot in many workplaces that a "computer professional" wouldn't put up with for a second.
That's such a beautiful poem of an idea. It all comes crashing down once it hits reality at a mere one mile per hour.
If you happen to be a tech writer, you are not exempt from overtime pay in California. Why is that, you ask? Are tech writers not minting money using a bit of time in front of a computer? Is there not a sellers market for tech writers?
But of course these are all the wrong questions to ask. It is because tech writers thought they deserved overtime pay, lobbied for it, and were granted their wishes. Scroll down for how that happened.
Scroll a bit further and you might realize that the original exemption was put in place by a long dead Republican senator from Idaho in 1990. I'm not convinced he had those deep insights into the market of computer professionals.
It is the job of any lobby to carve out exceptions to rules. From the NYT article above:
"...Under current rules, if an employer declares that an employee’s primary responsibility is executive, such as overseeing a cleanup crew, then that worker can be exempted from overtime.
White House officials said those rules were sometimes abused by employers in an attempt to avoid paying overtime. The new rules could require that employees perform a minimum percentage of “executive” work before they can be exempted from qualifying for overtime pay.
“Under current rules, it literally means that you can spend 95 percent of the time sweeping floors and stocking shelves, and if you’re responsible for supervising people 5 percent of the time, you can then be considered executive and be exempt"
That is a common tactic, but many Assistant Managers in the retail are seeing success fighting it through the courts and the push back continues to mount.
Yes, to demand it. My point is you can demand whatever you want. (Unlike the cleaning staff, who can "be shown the door if that's how they feel about it.")
It's not like being exempt means an employer is not allowed to offer you overtime pay. They can still do it. You can still demand it.
I guess I didn't recognize your point, because I don't see a huge discrepancy in ability-to-demand overtime, between cleaning people and technology staff.
Tech workers are more-well-paid than the cleaning staff and generally better situated to negotiate for any given job. But I don't see how that necessarily carries over to increased success in negotiating payment schemes that differ from the legal and industry standard for the position.
I think the point was that a regulator would be more sympathetically inclined to 'protect' the cleaning workers by legally mandating overtime since they necessarily have less negotiating leverage than white-collar workers.
But debugging and support is nonexempt - I wonder where, say, "production operations" falls in this, if you're on-call 24/7, and primarily put out fires caused by developer stupidity?
There is some debate about what exactly an exempt position is too. Companies seem to abuse what they consider to be an exempt position to the point that eventually employees fight back. I believe this happened a few years ago a RIM or AT&T.
For example if you are working a support job that regularly requires you to work 50+ hour weeks you should probably be getting overtime pay.
I worked for a University that classified some maintenance workers (among others) as exempt using the excuse that they had "supervisory" duties. The reality was that these people were on-call 24/7 and would have to come in whenever there was a problem, in addition to working a 40 hour week. Overtime was becoming expensive, so upper management decided that their duties weren't really fixing things, but rather supervising fixing things. Problem solved. They're now exempt and have to come in whenever their phone rings or they're fired.
I was in a similar position working support for a large international shipping company. I would work my 40 hours (day/afternoon/midnight) and then be required to take calls off hours. For example if I worked 6pm to 6am I would be required to wake up at 10am (mid sleep cycle) and join a BS staff meeting. Also if a major issue started during your shift you were expected to stay and handle it when you could turn it over to the next shift. Many times my colleagues would be on the 14 hours of their day while I sat there with nothing to do because they were handling it.
This isn't in California, but to get around that idea, they made other workers "report" to them. So technically they are the supervisor. But they have no authority other than to enter in time tickets.
California seems to be the state that has the most employee favorable employment laws. Other states should following things like the CA stance on non-competes.
As a EU citizen I hoped to see a /s under your post. I do not want to be rude but here it is obvious that if you work overtime you must be compensated and also very well (usually 1,5-2 times more than regular hours).
And not only it, in some states, like mine, you can work only a limited amount of hours (6 or 8, I don't remember well) overtime per week, otherwise it is illegal.
I've had very different experiences working in the EU (Belgium).
On my first day of work, I received a document containing company rules and guidelines. Overtime is never paid and it is considered "an engineer's pride" to fix any bugs in his own time. Of course this overtime isn't limited to bugfixing, and when there's a deadline coming up (there's always a deadline coming up) or when someting just isn't working you are expected to do whatever it takes to get things working.
One of my colleagues received comments on a recent evaluation after he refused to come in on a Saturday because there was a problem with a display driver on a project he hadn't worked on for weeks.
The 38 hours we work each week is more of a guideline than a rule really. Unless of course you want to work less, in which case that would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
Can't you just signal to authorities or unions that you were dismissed for that reason (that is not a "good enough" reason on my state) and basically fuck up the entire company considering that that guidelines document would come up in even the simplest investigation? This would put your employer in a weak position, so weak you can easily even blackmail him
You can always sue of course (there is no union in the company). But what would you gain by doing so? They might be forced to hire you again, in which case you can be assured you will never receive a raise and will generally not enjoy working there a whole lot.
You could even try proving you worked too many hours, but that's quite hard to do (a list of start and end times would surely not suffice).
Edit: Also, they will surely claim that they did not tell you to perform that overtime, and that in fact you did so without them knowing.
Th original link is to a US company operating in the US being investigated for breaking US laws by the US government. This forum is hosted by a US company on US soil and the large majority of readers and commenters work in the US. It's safe to assume that allsystemsgo is talking about US law unless otherwise stated.
I am sorry, but what I meant was "I thought that in any developed country the overtime work was obviously paid" not that "oh I think you were in EU zone".
Basically for me is very hard to understand why I should work for free ( I could want to work overtime for free, but if I am imposed to work overtime I must be paid)
>Basically for me is very hard to understand why I should work for free ( I could want to work overtime for free, but if I am imposed to work overtime I must be paid)
If you are in software engineering, the answer is that the US pays the best salaries in the world. You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.
No, a few small regions in the US pays amongst the best salaries in the world. Most of the US have software engineering salaries that are nothing special. And lots of places in Europe have plenty of jobs at similar salary levels to e.g. Silicon Valley.
> You are not working for free if you are salaried. You sign a contract to fulfill certain duties regardless of the amount of time it takes.
... and most of the developed world have seen through this bullshit. In the EU, for example, the Working Time Directive sets limits, and if the company assigns duties that are impossible to carry out within those limits, then that is the company's problem. For a reason: A lot of companies tried (and try) to abuse the notion of a salaried employee to pile on duties far in excess of what can reasonably be carried out within the expected contract period.
(looking to exempted groups in the UK: my ex was until recently a lawyer for one of the largest lawfirms in the world, based out of London; while on paper her contracted hours are about 40 and her salary on that basis seemed amazing, her actual hours based on assigned duties that would never be possible to fit into 40 hours per week brought her actual hourly rate below that of he secretary)
> And lots of places in Europe have plenty of jobs at similar salary levels to e.g. Silicon Valley.
Honest question: where? Switzerland? And how much are we talking? A fresh 22-year-old graduate can easily make $110k + stock his first year out of school in SV.
That might be ok if that's what happened, but it doesn't actually. You sign a contract which says something like "The employee will perform the duties of a software engineer to the best of her/his ability"; it's basically up to the boss to decide what those duties are on any given day.
I wished that for specific topics such as this one where the geographical location of a poster is highly relevant we would post our locations or have a switch in our profile to get a better outlook of where people are coming from.
It's 48 hours. You can be legally expected to work anything up to that without overtime pay, as a salaried employee.
And penalties for requiring employees to work over that, apply only when this is exceeded when it's averaged over a 17 week period.
But you're right, many fields pretty much bring up the 48-hour overtime exemption contract to you on day 1, many temp jobs, or things like catering/bar-work require you to sign one of these.
The best part about it is when you think about what your hourly rate would be if you made $80,000 and worked 60 hours a week with 20 of them being time and a half overtime.
Comes out to around $22/hr base rate.
You start doing that around $50k and you are around the same pay rate as an overnight stocker at a grocery with couple years on the job.
My back of the napkin put $50K @ 60 hours put at just above $13/hr base rate. Taking a look at Glassdoor, my guess would be several years of small raises would get you pretty close.
In any case, I don't believe that these companies will give overtime. In fact, your glassdoor link doesn't show any company paying over $30,000/year to their night workers, with the average being around $25,000.
That is correct. That is why I said it was the "base rate". The example was to illustrate what the employment opportunity would look like if an employer of a developer had to pay an hourly rate with overtime pay, instead of being able to pay them as an exempt salaried employee.
Assuming the position required 60 hour work weeks(as a non trivial amount of developer positions do) this is what the two would look like for exactly the same final pay.
With salary one can say: $50,000/year
With hourly one would say: $13/hr + overtime
While being the exact same pay, it looks quite a bit different. No?
It depends on your job and other factors, but sometimes the answer is, sadly, yes.
My mom is a soon-to-retire nurse and she was a salaried employee who, if she worked overtime, made either time-and-a-half (1.5x) or double-time (2x) pay depending upon the situation.
But software developers, for all of the talk of ninjas and rockstars and whatnot, are a socially low and easily exploited class that make decisions against our own interests (laughing off the idea of unions, etc); so we often work up to 1.5 to 2 times (60-80 hours is very common) over our official salaried hours for free.
Sounds bitter. Software developers are certainly not regarded as socially lower than a nurse, quite the opposite (at least in Europe).
But I _do_ agree that, compared to many other professions prestiges is low. I also agree that it's time for unions, although simply owing the company collectively may work better. More importantly, people should not allow themselves to be exploited and realise that doing so is just as bad for them as for their fellow developers.
I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US it is kind of a complex situation where we are externally not regarded as socially lower (from the outside it is all very glamorous and we are all Silicon Valley millionaires) and we do make decent baseline wages (though outside of a few companies like Google there tends to be a glass ceiling on our earnings unless we become something other than software developers, eg become tech managers) and (rather importantly right now) we do have a very high level of employability relative to many other professional fields.
But all that aside, we are still often exploited as a resource (IMO) by the "ruling class" of business people/MBA types/investors/etc in ways they would not allow themselves to be exploited.
That will definitely not help bring prestige to the field. Professions that require unions are seen as being so easy to enter that they need to form unions to avoid the effects of the free market.
Doctors and lawyers regulate who can enter their field. Doctors even control how many students med schools can accept each year. They seem to still be 'prestigious' professions. They were just smart enough to avoid the word 'union', since it's been tarnished by 50 years of political attacks.
I'd also trade in a lot of prestige for the guarantee of employers not having overtime as a free resource that employees are expected to give with a smile.
Healthcare is a high demand field, especially nursing. They seem to be able to negotiate shorter work weeks like working 3 10 hour days and being paid for 40 hours, etc. It's somewhat physically and mentally demanding.
Software is in high demand but still a middle class job (similar to nursing). It's very mentally demanding. The physical demand is different as it's a problem of not being active enough to be healthy. Not to mention that in software you are likely spending a significant time working outside of normal working hours if it's for your company or just to increase your skills/learn something new. How else are you supposed to have the required a super awesome github profile to show when you go for an interview?
In CA you have to make 84k a year for the computer professional overtime exemption. If you are making under that you are still getting overtime pay. There are many jobs that do not meet the requirements to be exempt also.
>so we often work up to 1.5 to 2 times (60-80 hours is very common) over our official salaried hours for free.
Take this with a grain of salt, it really depends on where you live. I live in the Ohio area and of everyone I went to college with and everyone I have ever worked with I have never met someone that has worked more than 45 hours a week.
For whatever it is worth, I am a software developer and I'm as guilty as any of working 80 hour weeks, especially in the first 10 years of my career.
I'm just older now (41 this year) and while I still work as a software developer and have avoided the management route (since I still love coding), I've become somewhat jaded on the business end of things.
Don't get me wrong, I think in certain situations (eg. developer is a founder or has meaningful preferential equity in a company) that working very long hours toward a goal without directly being paid for those hours is perfectly acceptable; but I cringe when I think of how many hours of sleep I missed in my younger days for a pat on the back or token meaningless non-monetary perks when I was a common-stock-holding pleb being constantly diluted out of equity in even the moderately successful companies.
Yes. Companies tend to abuse this in some cases and in other cases it's more lenient. Currently I will work overtime, without pay, if I project requires it. I will also take a few hours to go to a doctor appointment during the day. So it balances out.
Previously I had to work over 50-60 hours regularly without over time pay. That probably goes against what is expected of an "exempt" employee and I probably should have been compensated. I left that position for obvious reasons.
Generally in the US if you are paid a guaranteed yearly salary, meaning not paid hourly, you do not get overtime pay. One exception I've experience is in retail. For example the manager of our deli department would get paid 1/2 time (not time + 1/2) for overtime.
Silicon Valley wouldn't exist if those would be paid. It's one of the small 'perks' of making a 6 digit salary. You work so many unpaid overtime hours that your actual hourly wage isn't THAT high anymore. (especially if you also take only 10 vacation days into account etc)
A counter-argument is that overtime implements a necessary feedback loop against poor management and project planning. Overworking creative staff may not be optimal for innovation.
Silicon Valley wouldn't exist if those would be paid.
If that's the case, then Silicon Valley doesn't deserve to exist.
The only people for whom it's reasonable to expect unpaid overtime are genuine founders with real control over the company and their place in it, and who will get real rewards if it succeeds,
You work so many unpaid overtime hours that your actual hourly wage isn't THAT high anymore.
Maybe you do. Except on projects with direct benefit to your career, it's a waste of time and you'd be better off to stop. You don't get more respect by being a chump. You just get loaded with more grunt work.
You want your bosses to think you have leadership potential, not that you're a hard worker who can be used as a garbage disposal for stuff no one else wants to do, or who will accept abuse downwind of others' mistakes (understaffing, bad planning, etc.)
especially if you also take only 10 vacation days into account
Don't work for shitty companies. Three weeks is the absolute minimum.
There are exempt salaried workers and nonexempt salaried workers. The exemption refers to overtime pay. The LinkedIn employees were nonexempt (so they were owed payment for overtime).
Well, I work overtime usually for the first 6-12 months when I first start my job. I expect to be compensated for the hours I work overtime after reviews.
Should that not happen, I will assume the firm doesn't care if I move on after 2-3 years for opportunities with better compensation.
It is what it is. I'm married and have financial obligations. That said, who's to say I don't moonlight and make extra cash that way? ;-)
This is one of these HN discussion moments when you, our American friends, just have imagine all of Europe sitting with an open mouth, enjoying the radical feeling of labour law disaster tourism.
Funny, "labor law disaster tourism" could also explain how an American feels visiting Spain, France or Italy right now.
No system is perfect, but let's not pretend labor laws in the EU don't come with massive downsides (unemployment, difficulty to start or grow a business, purchasing power of discretionary income).
Here's a simple rule of thumb for understanding the situation in the US: if you have to be at work at a specific time and get scheduled breaks, you probably get paid overtime. If you're judged on your output and nobody notices when you go get coffee, eat lunch or start in the morning, you probably get paid a consistent salary regardless of exact hours you were in the office.
>No system is perfect, but let's not pretend labor laws in the EU don't come with massive downsides (unemployment, difficulty to start or grow a business, purchasing power of discretionary income).
Unemployment wasn't caused by labor laws, it was caused by intentionally destructive pan-EU fiscal policy.
Difficulty to start or grow a business - compared to silicon valley, maybe. Fewer investors / smaller markets. Not really a labor law thing.
Purchasing power of discretionary income - caused by the high dollar, which is in turn caused by US military hegemony. Not labor laws.
Well, you know about our "free" lunches and amazing hardware "given" by the company, fancy offices, etc. Now you know where the money comes from :-).
Seriously though, there are companies all over the place, from startups where everyone is expected to work 80 hours a week to established companies where people have kids and most employees work 40-45 hours a week with the occasional 50-60 during a release.
Some companies leverage it (the term we use her is "work-life balance").
The reach of these kinds of lawsuits (see also the Yahoo one from a few years ago) goes far beyond the affected employees. For example, I'm a dev but I've never worked in ops or any other role where I was considered "on call", so I have never had the opportunity for being in the plaintiff class of any of these kinds of suits. But just reading about them makes me reconsider a lot of things. Despite not being "on call", I have still put in tons of unpaid overtime over the years, which is unfortunately considered typical for a software dev these days. Reading about lawsuits like this has essentially motivated me to stop doing that. If others are getting paid for overtime (even if it's through lawsuits) but I'm not, then I won't put in those extra hours. It's changed my life for the better, despite not being directly affected.
Does anyone have insight into which LinkedIn employees this actually applies to?
I'd think that the majority of LinkedIn employees are computer professionals or sales people, to whom overtime laws don't apply.
Also, this thread has a lot of consternation/discussion about overtime payment for software developers. If you consider our bargaining power, overtime protection is completely unnecessary. Just find a new job where people will either pay you a commiserate salary with your work hours, or find one which doesn't expect ludicrous hours.
Despite the stereotypes, it's perfectly possible to find great technology jobs where you work 40-45 hours a week.
I had this happen to me at a company that I owned in the past. I got the DOL to chop the total amount due in half and then got them to allow us to pay it out over 4 or 5 years. (All without a lawyer btw...)
Liquidated damages the DOL collects are paid out to the workers, so the assumption is that you are bragging about screwing the workers by 'negotiating' damages.
Let me ask you a question. Do you personally (or anyone else) think that there is anything wrong with trying to negotiate down what the government tried to recover and possibly penalize? Before you answer please review the facts here again:
"Do you personally (or anyone else) think that there is anything wrong with trying to negotiate down ... backpay owed by law to employees of my own company" FTFY.
Oh, and the answer is yes; there's a lot wrong with that.
Everyone reading this thread would probably appreciate it if you provided more information. Your brevity almost sounds like gloating as it says nothing in regards to the well-being of your employees except that the money that you managed to owe them less than half of what the DOL originally figured.
In your other comment, you mentioned "some hidden rule"– what rule? How did you go about resolving it? I expect you could have some extra insight given that you did not involve a lawyer on your behalf. Size of the company, timeframe which this took place, etc. would all probably be helpful. We want to know what the less nefarious reasons you mentioned above actually are.
Well yes I was bragging. I was pretty proud that I got it cut in half after an attorney told me to just pay the full amount that (he was a labor lawyer) he didn't think they would budge. So yes I was proud that I did that but more importantly wanted to point out that it was possible, at least then in that particular office. In business sometimes just knowing something is possible can enable you to try.
"except that the money that you managed to owe them less than half of what the DOL originally figured"
Well as a business person of course I'm going to try and minimize the dollars owed. But further to the employees it was essentially found money they didn't have an issue (other than the one employee who did apparently) in the first place.
The company was about 20 employees. This happened over the course of a few years. It involved the fact (from memory) that you didn't have to give employees (of this type) any breaks but if you did give them breaks they had to be 15 or 20 minutes (don't remember).
So here is the scenario (for this type of employee).
You work and you don't get any breaks. - Ok says the DOL
You work and you get, say, 20 minutes break. - Ok says the DOL.
You work and you get, say, 15 minutes break. - No says the DOL must be
20 minutes you owe them pay for the 15 minutes they weren't working.
Only thing I don't remember is if it was 15 minutes needed or 20 minutes. The point
is we were off by 5 minutes so we owed back pay for that.
So once again breaks weren't required but if you give them they
have to be of a certain length. And it had nothing to do with
a job description that generally referenced breaks either. No mention was
made of breaks when hiring. And they didn't have to take breaks either.
I did not vote for your comment either way because of the limited information. Bragging or not I wanted to know what you were bragging about, so thanks for the extra info.
Who are these employees? I don't know any developers who get paid overtime. Even at shitty companies with shitty pay I have worked at least 55 hrs/week and during launches over 70 hrs/week.
I wonder how did the Linkedin employees organized in order to file the lawsuit? I imagine that, if the wrong person heard about the plan, the organizers would be fired right away.
prohibiting off-the-clock work to all nonexempt employees
I presume this doesn't include computer professionals, which for some reason are exempt [1], as are sales staff on commission or, you know, farmworkers. Can someone explain why this insanity continues?
The original source for that exemption seems to be [2], an act from 1990
To eliminate "substantial documentary evidence" requirement for minimum wage determination for American Samoa
which also includes this provision. All I can figure from the history of this bill that can be found online is that in 1990 Idaho, senator James McClure decided to fuck over tech workers and sneaked that into a bill on American samoa (snooze). 25 years later and here we are not getting paid.
It persists partially because tech industry workers are especially susceptible to class confusion. That is, the startup culture stock option lottery deludes them into thinking they are a part of the ownership class rather than the working class. Thus, they allow basically all of the fruits of their labor to be stolen from them.
That, and powerful lobbyists keep anything from changing.
Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote also comes to mind here. It has far more broad application than merely as a suggested explanation for the failure of socialism to take root in America. I find it is a very useful shorthand to describe a great many interactions between labor and ownership in this country, whatever the industry.
The tech industry is especially bad in that regard. It's not just the startup culture; it's more general than that. Many programmers have serious ego issues (as in, big egos and unjustifiable arrogance) and, in a somewhat amusing and baffling way, believe very strongly in the notion that the software industry is a meritocracy.
It persists partially because tech industry workers are especially susceptible to class confusion. That is, the startup culture stock option lottery deludes them into thinking they are a part of the ownership class rather than the working class. Thus, they allow basically all of the fruits of their labor to be stolen from them.
Very well said. They take everything literally and accept management's account of all things uncritically, which makes it really easy to run divide-and-conquer games over them.
It also lowers their status (as I discussed here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other...) because they out themselves as chumps when they take a shitty deal. If you make it clear that you'll let people take advantage of you, they never stop doing so.
On the other hand, those who show themselves to be politically astute are either tapped for executive roles or "culture fitted" (read: fired for their threat to the cult of cluelessness, although it's often dressed as performance-based). Which of those two outcomes one gets tends to happen for political, rather than "meritocratic" reasons, and can be hard to predict before the fact. So that's a risky avenue, too.
And I don't think there are really any Losers destined for Cluelessness. The Clueless are the people who don't understand office politics, or think they can climb the career ladder simply by working hard and being loyal employees (not through strategic social climbing). Losers are people who understand and see the ladder there but choose not to be social climbers. They gossip, do crossword puzzles, punch out and go spend time with their kids. There are lots of Clueless destined to become Losers once they get burned out and realize what's up. Once you've learned that you can't unlearn it.
Low status people tend to divide into three camps: delusional, apathetic, and confrontational.
Low status, delusional: Clueless.
Low status, apathetic: Losers.
The confrontational ones either (a) learn how to play the game and become Sociopaths, (b) consciously develop apathy and learn how to slack and become losers, or (c) continue raging until they're expelled/fired from the organization.
There are a lot of comments like this in this thread, the gist of which being "people who don't demand overtime pay are deluded/stupid/victims of false consciousness/act against their own interest."
Pretty much everyone is an at will employee, free to go find another job. Since these exempt positions tend to be high skill, the logic behind these laws is that these kinds of employees don't need this extra layer of government protection between them and their paycheck. They have the wherewithal to go find another employer if they feel they're being treated unfairly.
The left wing side of this argument is certainly getting a hearing, but coming to a different conclusion doesn't make you a deluded member of the under class (if I'm interpreting your claptrap correctly).
You missed the point entirely and then went off on a rant about the "left wing" which is unsupported by any evidence or even coherent argument in your comment.
Implicit in your comment is an assumption that there is no information asymmetry and that power (real power--the social, political, and economic ability to actually assert oneself) is shared relatively equally between the owners of capital and laborers. I stopped being surprised that people actually believe such "claptrap" long ago, but am still amused by it.
"people who don't demand overtime pay are deluded/stupid/victims of false consciousness/act against their own interest"
right? This is was I took him gnu8 to mean when he said "... the startup culture stock option lottery deludes them into thinking they are a part of the ownership class rather than the working class. Thus, they allow basically all of the fruits of their labor to be stolen from them." What other point am I missing?
I think my post and the follow up make a pretty coherent argument that no, in fact, mass delusion on the part of tech industry workers is not the best explanation. The delusion argument is an argument from the "left wing," especially when given in terms of capital and labor and conflict between classes and so forth. That's just a positive statement, not a normative one, so I don't understand how that can constitute a "rant."
What I think might be illuminating to Europeans who are incredulous about how our workers would allow the "fruits of their labor to be stolen," would be to hear why they might not consider working unpaid overtime to be being stolen from.
You understood my comment correctly. False consciousness is a good explanation because of the fact that tech workers accept such a meager proportion of the profits generated by their work without complaint. Why would anyone knowingly accept less money than they're worth? They wouldn't, knowingly. It must be unknowingly. They must not know they're being exploited because there is no significant organization. Instead they all act as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and try to increase their wealth incrementally, by competing amongst themselves for promotions and raises, working 100 hour weeks at startups for equity, and so on.
You suggest that they look elsewhere for a better deal, as if the free market price for their labor is by definition a fair price, but it is not, because of the power differential between capital and labor. It's not that all business collude consciously against labor(1), it's simply that the exception in the law for tech workers drives the price down, because it's purely good management not to pay any more than necessary for labor.
I'm not suggesting mass strikes, labor unions, and Marxist claptrap as a solution. Removing the loophole would be an entirely reasonable starting point. I've never seen anything approaching a rational justification for the tech worker exemption.
(1) Except when they do, like with the recent wage fixing scandal amongst a subset of well known companies.
>'They have the wherewithal to go find another employer if they feel they're being treated unfairly.'
That completely misses the point.
The parent is observing a behavior in the industry as a whole, not a specific employer.
Argue that the industry doesn't evidence this or argue that programmers should become plumbers, but boiling it down to 'go find another job' is nonsense in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
I really don't understand the point you're trying to make here. The parent says that tech industry workers are "deluded" because they think of themselves as part of the "ownership class" rather than the "working class," thus allowing the "fruits of their labor" to be "stolen," so clearly he's talking about the behavior of individuals, albeit en masse. Because they're deluded, they're acting irrationally.
All I'm saying that given the job fluidity within the tech industry as a whole, it is unlikely that individuals are going to allow themselves to be compensated at rates very much less than the value they provide. Having the government force employers and employees to account for their work on an hourly basis, so that their labor is not "stolen," is a restriction on their respective individual freedom. So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.
>'All I'm saying that given the job fluidity within the tech industry as a whole, it is unlikely that individuals are going to allow themselves to be compensated at rates very much less than the value they provide.'
The industry is not necessarily fluid [1] and more importantly any intra-industry fluidity there might be is irrelevant in the context of an entire industry demonstrating the issue you mean to avoid.
>'So the other side to the parents argument is that maybe the tech industry as a whole is not deluded, maybe it just wants this freedom.'
I'd hardly call that 'the other side'. A possibility, sure and if you personally feel that way, fine.
To suggest that the industry as a whole would or does consciously trade an considerable amount of pay for that 'freedom' is absurd.
Also, please stop selectively quoting the grandparent (neatly avoiding the predicating 'partially' of course) in these responses as if you didn't just sum up and summarily dismiss an entire side of this discussion with 'go find another job' in the intervening posts.
The physical toll is there for many in this career but it's damage from a lack of physicality vs the damage from being over physical such as construction. Almost all of my family are pipefitters and I often envy them for doing something physical but it has also taken a toll on my father. They also get paid time and 1/2 and double time as required. They make about what I make in this industry but tend to work more paid hours to do it.
I understand you are taking the "free market" side of the argument but at a certain point employers hold too much power and employees start fight back. Things like that are why unions exist which are also a part of the free market.
The computer employee exemption does not include employees engaged in the manufacture or repair of computer hardware and related equipment. Employees whose work is highly dependent upon, or facilitated by, the use of computers and computer software programs (e.g., engineers, drafters and others skilled in computer-aided design software), but who are not primarily engaged in computer systems analysis and programming or other similarly skilled computer-related occupations identified in the primary duties test described above, are also not exempt under the computer employee exemption.
I worked at a major defense contractor as a mechanical engineer, and they worked really hard to make sure all of the engineers were classified as exempt. We filled out a questionnaire every year that was definitely crafted to proved that we were high level employees and therefore exempt. Yet they still paid OT anyway to avoid future liability, if you worked >45 hours a week, we got time and a half for every hour above 40. Considering most people worked ~50 hours a week, everyone collected OT every pay cycle. I actually funneled the OT off into a separate bank account for spending on vacation, it was that consistent.
Meanwhile OT for software engineers is seemingly non-existent for effectively the same job. I'd love to find out who got that loophole passed.
"The recruiters accepted our exemptions because they were going after bigger fish: the engineers. The computer engineers who work as W-2 contractors are generally earning $100-300/hr and often work 60-80 hours per week. The recruiters were afraid that if such workers were entitled to overtime pay, the companies may cut overtime work, and therefore the recruiters would lose their 30-50% share of that money (this can be much as $6,000 per week to a recruiter for a single worker.)
Engineers have always refused to organize or even to be aware of their interests: they think recruiters are their friends. One engineer said to me: "Engineers think they're so smart that no one could do such a thing to them. Wow. They got really screwed." The law is an annual loss of as much as $50-75,000 dollars per each engineer. Yep, it's legal. The recuiters wrote a law to take away their money. Silicon Valley engineers were plundered by their "friends"."
> However, the above exemption does not apply to an employee if any of the following apply:
...
> The employee is a writer engaged in writing material, including box labels, product descriptions, documentation, promotional material, setup and installation instructions, and other similar written information, either for print or for onscreen media or who writes or provides content material intended to be read by customers, subscribers or visitors to computer-related media such as the Internet or CD-ROMs.
So if you're a frontend dev who isn't spoon-fed 100% of the copy you put up on the site, it's apparently illegal for you to be paid below $84k if you work more than 12 hours in a day without getting overtime? IANAL, but there's no other exemption for co-founders and other early employees, then I'd venture to say that 99% of startups have broken this law...
It keeps using the word "employee". How does this apply to contractors and consultants? Do they negotiate their own terms? Are high earning ones expected to be exempt like employees?
However, if it is discovered that a "contractor" is an employee everywhere but on paper, then the employer can still be liable for labor law violations. IIRC part of the test is "Can they choose their own hours? Do they use their own tools or are they provided/maintained by the employer? Does the employer dictate how they must do their work, or only specify deliverables?"
Exempt and non-exempt are terms that only apply to employees. Contractors would generally be expected work work hourly (like non-exempt) or on a project basis (like exempt) depending on their negotiated contract. But in general I don't think that this kind of employment law applies to contractors.
That's an exemption from the federal minimum wage (the "MW" next to it). It seems to be designed to encourage employers to hire disabled workers they might not otherwise employ, though I don't know whether it has positive effects in practice. It does have some provisions aimed at reducing abuse, such as requiring employers to first come up with an objective test of disability relative to the job in question (e.g. this person performs at 80% of the capacity of a typical non-disabled worker), then to determine the prevailing wage for non-disabled workers in similar jobs, and then to pay them no less than e.g. 0.8 x prevailing_wage, which can as a special exception to the minimum wage drop below the usual minimum-wage level.
I'm surprised they're getting praised so much for complying. It's not like they had a choice.
Instead of commending them on their newfound diligence, we should be asking why and how these overtime violations occurred in the first place. Was it a systemic problem with lower management incentives? How far up did knowledge of the violations extend? Why wasn't it detected until now, and what can we do to prevent it from happening elsewhere, not just within LinkedIn?