The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Employment Hours Standards Question

Employment Hours Standards Question

This is a question for you U.S.A. fellows.

I am from Canada and we have something called the Employment Standards Act which states that a full-time employee can't work more than X (don't remember how much, probably 50) hours per week without getting paid OT. But this Act doesn't apply to people in the Technology field (Engineers, Developers, and in general people consider Professionals). There are other groups as well that are exempt, but I don't remember them.

I was wondering if you have a similar problem in the US? And does it piss you off as much as it pisses me off? Because basically, you could get paid a salary and an employer can MAKE you work more than 40+ hrs per week and there is no law to stop them from basically taking your life away. Thank god I work on contract now.

Gp
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Yes, there are similar laws about mandatory overtime, and yes software engineers are exempt from these laws (meaning, they have no legal right to OT).

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

I think it's insane that employers can expect people to work an unlimited # of hours without extra pay. They don't do it here where I work thank God.
If someone makes a good salary because they have a professional level education, why should they therefore lose all rights to a personal life? And those high salaries are misleading because at least a third goes to taxes, and because some locations have a very high cost of living.
This is an example of a law that needs changing.

The Real PC
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

I think california or Oregon had a state law against this.

Otherwise in the US ... don't try to force your employer to do the right thing. Find an employer who does the right thing anyway.

JMHO ...

Matt H.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

The reason why professionals are "exempt" was originally not to encourage slave-driving of programmers, but because professionals wanted to self-police their own professions. e.g. doctors didn't want government butting in and telling them how many hours they could or could not work.

wormser
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

In my state, an employer can require an employee to work (paid) overtime. They can't physically bar the door, of course, but they can make working overtime a condition of employment.

But then, I live in a backward state, where guys drive around with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks...

Grumpy Old-Timer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

If people weren't such sheep & if they didn't live paycheck-to-paycheck then the law wouldn't really matter.

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Real PC,

Where do you live? Quite frankly, I am ready to move and would not just be happy, but substantially prefer to devote my considerable development skills towards the success and improvement of a society in which my humanity is acknowledged.

Humanist
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

What I don't get is how people expect quality code to come out of sleep-deprived employees. Anything more then 14 hours a day for more then a week, and your just causing as many bugs as your fixing.

vince
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

>>
Because basically, you could get paid a salary and an employer can MAKE you work more than 40+ hrs per week and there is no law to stop them from basically taking your life away.
<<

I don't understand thinking like this. Your employer can't "MAKE" you do anything. It's a pretty simple concept. You do what they want, they give you money. If you don't do what they want, they don't give you money. They aren't making you do anything. You are doing it of your own freewill in order to obtain money. Quit whining to mommy government every time you have a problem and go make money elsewhere if you don't like the terms of employment (and I see you've already done this so I don't know what the problem is).

SomeBody
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

And I wonder how many of those who complain about working 10+ hour days actually do real work anywhere close to that many hours versus the web (Joel on Software forums for example?), FreeCell, coffee breaks, etc..

SomeBody
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

While the OP only says he's Candian, that means it's at least 35% that he's in Ontario, so...

Ontario Ministry of Labour - Employment Standards:
http://www.gov.on.ca/lab/english/es/index.html

Anonymous Coward
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Your right, I am from Ontario. I went through the ESA many times whith a buddy of mine when he was having a dispute with Future Sh...err Best Buy about discrimination due to a disability. That is when I found out that my profession is not entitled to overtime.

Gp
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

What a tired cliche from 'somebody' there.

Basically, life is too short for everyone to bounce from job to job to job until they find a good one. The company that's overworking its staff is probably going to fail sooner rather than later as a result of the staff turnover - so there it is, a terrible waste of time, effort and investment money.

So what's wrong with agreeing '8 hours a day' and getting on with doing some work? Is the hubris of the managing classes such that they *refuse* to learn from the mistakes of the past, *especially* if the government is suggesting the solution?

bow lock
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

I've worked pretty much in pure software companies, and mostly small ones.

The reality has been for most of my professional life, that we were not required to put in a certain number of hours, be that 4, 8, or 14. We self-assessed our work, and were expected to meet goals and milestones as we'd promised. There were plenty of days where I was in the office less than 8 hours, and some where it was more. There were times when I worked at home, sometimes as my primary mode of work (as I do now).

I've found the working hours -- both in specific arrival times and hour count -- to be extremely flexible.

So when I hear that people are being forced to work 9, 10, 12 hours a day, without overtime, on a regular basis, it makes me wonder about the type of company they work at. Is it a pure software company, or the IT department of a non-software company? Is it a small company, or a large one?

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

What a sad world we live in when freedom is described as a "tired cliche".

I don't "bounce" into a job. I select the jobs I wish to apply for and then select the offer I wish to accept. You'll note here that at any time I'm free to not apply for work at any given employer and to also reject an offer from any given employer. I realize these notions are almost as radical as quitting a bad job.

If an employer is bad enough to try to force ridiculous hours on employees, they're going to be bad in other areas as well. Life is too short to work for an employer like this.

SomeBody
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

So why do these 'long hours' companies even exist? Why are we even having this discussion? Perhaps capitalism is too forgiving of shitty companies?

bow lock
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Brad Wilson, for a while I worked at well-funded dot com where I was expected to work late, start early and work on the weekends, in order to meet very stupid deadlines set by stupid and greedy managers.

Those managers paid themselves $500,000 ( I found out later) and also got big stock options. On Saturdays they might drop in for 10 minutes on their way back from golf or the beach - the heroes.

Meantime I worked so much I suffered stress and wasn't seeing my children hardly at all. My pay was tiny. It was this experience that made me realise programmers are exploited and that unions aren't so irrelevant after all.

JM
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

So, we should unionize to protect the stupid?

RocketJeff
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Read the post again - I think he meant unionize to protect us from the "stupid and greedy managers".

Of course, you might think that handing millions of dollars of investor money straight to stupid people who are too stupid to run succesful companies is a good idea. But it sounds pretty stupid to me.

bow lock
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

From his discription, he was working insane hours, not seeing his family and under a lot of stress - he was also not making a lot of money.

His bosses, OTOH, were making plenty and didn't seem stresses or spend insane hors at the office.

Who was stupid???

RocketJeff
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

OH, I SEE! Doing very little work for lots of money is good because it's clever. Right, let's *all* do nothing from now on. Oh wait, that's called 'going on strike', and that's a bad thing.

So instead of trying to improve the conditions in our current place of work, we either shut up and let ourselves get shat on, or we leave and find another job. The end result? Companies fail, endless hours of hard work go to waste, tons of investor money goes on the fire, and the economy gets in such a state that it's only just showing a glimmer of recovery.

All because a few greedy assholes were so 'clever' that they didn't have to bother listening to their staff.

So much for the invisible hand.

bow lock
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Do the same laws of hourly versus exempt employment status exist in the outsourcing nations (i.e. India, Russia)?

m
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Of course not, that's why they're 'competitive'.

Outsourced
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

>> If people weren't such sheep & if they didn't live paycheck-to-paycheck then the law wouldn't really matter.

This pretty much says it all. I agree that employers can be bastards, but it's also the fault of the workforce for ratcheting their personal obligations to the level that they have absolutely no negotiating ability.

Most programmers I've worked around would eat a plate of steaming dog sh*t if they were browbeat sufficiently.

And the reality is that those few programmers who have the balls and the financial stability to hold out for reasonable working conditions wind up being categorized by the scum recruiters and the HR droids as being too "high maintenance" to fool with. IE, the occasional programmer with self esteem is outnumbered 20:1 by the desperate scab workforce.

Bored Bystander
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Outsourced - I would think this would make them less competitive. If I spend 80 hours on a project in one week, I am an idiot, but more importantly, I only get paid a flat rate. If an hourly work does 80 hours on a project in one week, they bill for 80 hours and not 40.

m
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Oops! You're right, I typed it wrong - I meant to say "Of course, that's why they're 'competitive'.", meaning that labor regulations are even more lax and anti-worker in those countries, which gives them an advantage.

I find it amazing that companies that bill out workers hours to clients *by the hour* get a huffy about the worker getting paid for those hours. A real double standard there.

Outsourced
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Bored Bystander - I think it can be generalized to most of the population of the U.S.A. and possibly most of the planet, not limited to the programming crowd.

I wonder though, if everybody had self-esteem, or financial stability as you call it, would much get done in the world, and hence would there be financial instability? Perhaps it is like many other things, sound advice which is at odds with human nature.

m
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

I don't agree with Bored's comments about personal obligations, which I assume to mean debt. I don't have any debt at all - my house and cars are paid for. Likewise, most programmers I know don't have all that high debt, though some of them do have martgages for modest houses which are amazingly NEEDED to sleep in and payments on mid range cars which are actually NEEDED to drive to work. I don't see that either of these things are ostentatious and living high off the hog.

And yet working conditions are crap in most employment situations, with long hours and weekends required to meet arbitrary and unjustifiable deadlines.

Actually, I don't mind working overtime. And I might even be OK with being paid SINGLE TIME for the hours worked. But the fact is, I don't get jack shit for the 26 hours over 40 hours I work on average each week. And when I retire, I fully expect to see the social security system defaulted and the company pension plan to have gone bankrupt from underfunding due to playing games with the books, a practice both legal and endemic.

Outsourced
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

"If an hourly work does 80 hours on a project in one week, they bill for 80 hours and not 40."

Unless of course the project was really only a 40 hour project. Or worse, a 20 hour project.

There are lazy, stupid and greedy managers. And there are lazy, stupid and greedy programmers. etc etc

If you don't think you are lazy, stupid or greedy, that doesn't automatically mean that the person you work for (or the person working for you) is.

Incidentally, last I checked Ontario has no legislation requiring you to work overtime either. Perhaps it is time to reread "Getting to Yes" (definitive negotiating manual) to learn how to say No...

In any case, unions are not a magic answer. In a good company, unions make human relations more difficult (things have to be done "by the book" instead of common sense and compassion). Union rules often are specified down to an absurd levels. Unions can mean that good workers get shafted when compared to slackers who know how to work the system. In a very large union, the needs of the individuals are often not well met because of the sheer volume of people, especially when the union spans multiple companies.

Life is not a zero sum game!

.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003

Outsourced – What is this “company pension plan” that you speak of? I thought those were just a legend.

m
Thursday, November 13, 2003

It's a mythical thing which is used in salary negotiations to justify the small salary you are getting. The idea is that this 'benefit', to be paid in 45 years or so if you live that long, overrides the fact that you are making less than your trucker friends. The trick is that you'll never see that 'benefit', even if you did manage to make it through the 45 years of low pay and long hours without being downsized.

Outsourced
Thursday, November 13, 2003

Sometimes I feel sorry for you poor sods. Over here the European Working Time Directive specifies a maximum working week of 48 hours and few other things.

The basic rights and protections that the Regulations provide are (by the miracle of cut & paste from http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/work_time_regs/ ) :

• a limit of an average of 48 hours a week which a worker can be required to work (though workers can choose to work more if they want to).
• a limit of an average of 8 hours work in 24 which nightworkers can be required to work.
• a right for night workers to receive free health assessments.
• a right to 11 hours rest a day.
• a right to a day off each week.
• a right to an in-work rest break if the working day is longer than six hours.
• a right to four weeks paid leave per year.

A cynic writes
Thursday, November 13, 2003

(engage smug mode)
Oh - and although company pension schemes are being replaced over here by group personal pensions I managed to start working at my current place before they closed the scheme to new staff.

Therefore, my pension is based on how long I work here and what my final salary is and I don't have to contribute.

A cynic writes
Thursday, November 13, 2003

[Where do you live? Quite frankly, I am ready to move and would not just be happy, but substantially prefer to devote my considerable development skills towards the success and improvement of a society in which my humanity is acknowledged.

Humanist]

It isn't because of the location (USA), but because this is a non-profit and salaries are lower.
But the salaries are still ok, and my ego doesn't depend on having a giant salary.

The Real PC
Thursday, November 13, 2003

Cynic,

So how hard is it for nonolinguistic norteamericanos to emigrate to europe? Is it possible?