I’m salaried and typically work 40-45 hours per week. But yesterday I came in late (had to take my car in for work) and today I’m taking a extra half hour at lunch to run some errands. I don’t have to worry about clocking in or out or having to make up the hours to make sure my paycheck is the same. Also, though I’m expected to work “core business hours” my schedule is a bit more flexible than the hourly paid employees who work here. And I earn more then they do which is another avantage.
I’ve worked places where 40 hours was the standard and whether you had more or less work than you could do in that time, you still only worked 40.
I’ve been plenty of places that expected 45 to be the standard.
I’ve been places where ‘Face time’ was more important than any actual work accomplishments. The idiot bosses only cared that you were there at 6am when one boss came by and you were there at 6pm when someone else came checking. If you were sleeping or screwing off or taking 3 hour lunches in between, it didn’t matter as long as you were there.
With a decent boss, Salary protects you in case you need to take off a few hours this week for some reason. With almost all bosses, it protects you when there’s only 20 hours of work to be done that week. With bad bosses, it’s called selling your soul for a paycheck, as they think it means they own all of your time.
If you have a salaried employee you have to pay him when he’s not working: when he’s sick or on vacation or has a family emergency. If someone’s hourly, you don’t.
Everyone I know who is salary gets screwed by it. When they break down there pay by the hour, they make less than the hourly employees, because of the hours they are made to work.
And from reading some of the posts here about software engineers and such on salary, I can’t see how it is good for the company. Paying you to sit on your ass and surf the web, or to come in late and leave early is bad business.
You aren’t paid to sit on your ass. You’re paid to accomplish your assignments. Whether you accomplish your assignments after screwing around for a couple of hourse, or work all day doesn’t matter, what matters is your deliverables.
Software is a funny deliverable in that someone who knows that they are doing can accomplish a given task in 5 minutes that might take someone else 10 hours of frustrating debugging and research. Then next week the roles are reversed and the expert spends 10 hours trying to accomplish a task that would take the other guy 5 minutes. It’s not like assembling widgets or processing TPS reports where everyone is expected to churn out about the same amount of output over time, with skilled workers producing a bit more and new workers a bit less.
You’re also being paid to BE THERE during those hours in case something happens that needs your attention or in case some other work comes up or whatever. Like in my position. There are five of us. Most of the time the job could be done by 2.5 of us. But some days all five of us are screaming busy. And then there’s sick days, vacation days, etc that result in there sometimes only being two or three of us here.
If, like one of my previous employers, you didn’t plan for peak coverage but rather ‘average’ coverage; then you fail, because on more than one occasion, we had only one person trying to cover everything because of sick days and the like (at that point it becomes triage, dealing with things on priority basis and telling people with less important needs to call back tomorrow).
If I were an hourly employee, how would I count the time sitting at the airport waiting for my business trip flight? Or even on the plane, assuming I do a little bit of work and a little bit of dozing? What about at home in the evening when I see that I got a couple of emails around dinner time, so I rattle off some replies while chowing down? Or thinking about a difficult problem while in the shower?
Hourly wages are just impractical for certain types of jobs. Besides the practicality, salary is valuable to me in that I don’t have to worry about all that time-accounting. I just do my work, and I get paid.