I’m salaried but also get overtime if I work over 40 hours per week.
I chose the first option though because I spend most of my day on here, so really it’s more a question of how much “paid undertime” I’m getting.
Typically 4-5, sometimes more. But not after next Friday! Goodbye, suckers!
I’m an office manager for transcription services (just got the promotion, whee. Officially middle management now, my dream come true) and I used to put in anywhere from 1-5 overtime hours. I’ve finally gotten the department streamlined to where I don’t have to do that any more except in emergencies.
I don’t work a single minute of unpaid overtime. And on top of that, it’s only a 37.5 hour work week. And any travel I do (either driving someplace, or flying, including just waiting around in the airport) counts towards OT.
If I do go over 37.5, I either get paid at time and a half, or I get “comp time” at time at a half that I can save (up to a week’s worth, so 37.5 hours) and use as either vacation, personal, or sick time.
I feel really sorry for people that don’t get overtime…I know a lot of salaried jobs don’t get it, but I still don’t understand it…does anyone know why there are federal laws saying anything over 40 hours a week is OT, unless youi’re one of several calsses of exempt jobs? Why do these exempt jobs exist?
Typically 4-5, sometimes more. But not after next Friday! Goodbye, suckers!
The theory is – at least from my point of view – is that we don’t get paid to put in hours; we get paid to get a job done. If it takes 60 hours in a week to get that job done … tough cookies. The 40-hour work week at this level is just a guidline. As I said, there are some weeks where I’ll take a half day, or the team will go out for drinks or a long lunch or whatever, and I don’t get docked money.
It varies depending on the time of the month, from 2-3 hours when things are going well to 12-15 hours if things are especially busy. I went for the average at 6-10. I’m in financial accounting.
That should go down a bit over the next couple of months though, as we recently hired a couple more people for my team and we’re in the process of getting them trained up to help spread the workload a bit.
See now if more companies believed this I might still be an employee. If things were slow they would create something to keep us busy, when things were crazy it was “ah well too bad for the salaried workers”. Now I’m a contractor and I bill for what I work. No one cares if it’s slow and I leave early and I have thoughts of my billing to keep me smiling when I work all weekend.
Full time for me is 37.5 and if I do work extra I get comp time. My boss is a damned fool and stays late often, but me? Hell no.
Right. There’s no such thing as “overtime” when you are salaried because the idea is that you’re paid to do a job, not work some number of hours. I’m expected to manage my own time and exercise good judgement about when to come in, when to leave, and whether it is acceptable or desirable to work from home given my current workload.
I voted 11-15 given that the OP seems to be considering anything over 40 hrs/week as overtime. I’m an IT Systems Admin.
Product Manager at a major internet company.
Working tons of unpaid overtime kinda goes without saying here in the valley. Sending out email at midnight is not uncommon at all. I actually have a release going out tonight so I’ll be in the office till at least 11pm should everything go fine.
I won’t even go into working at a startup…
No bread, no lead. Our forefathers fought and died for the 40 hour workweek, and I refuse to dishonor their sacrifices for some punk-ass haves.
I voted 6-10. I’m in IT. I based that on the fact that I usually eat lunch at my desk, and there’s almost always an hour or two of something that needs doing in the evening at least once a week. Luckily, “working after hours” for me usually means “connected via VPN on my laptop while I’m sitting on the couch watching Law & Order reruns”, so it’s not too bad.
I’m also lucky that my employer doesn’t mind when I need to come in late, go home early, or take a three hour lunch to take care of obligations, so I figure it all evens out in the end.
Engineer here, chemical, manufacturing.
It varies a lot. Mostly depending on if any manufacturing issues pop up. These absolutely must be solved immediately, damn the hours.
“Salaried” and “Unpaid Overtime” are basically incompatible ideas, at least in my field. It’s been clear since the day I was hired - I was not hired to work 40 hours a week, I was hired to do the job. If that means a week or two of 12 hour days - well, that’s the job. That doesn’t happen often, but it does once in a while.
Work travel is another wrinkle. I’m required to spend about 15% of my time on the road. I really don’t like this, but again, that’s the job.
My managers aren’t at all jerks about it though. They’re probably better than fair. When things are slower nobody bats an eye if we take an afternoon off to go play golf. My normal hours are pretty flexible (though I am somewhat on call 24/7, since manufacturing is 24/ 7). If I do have an exceptionally heavy work day or week, they’ll usually give me a half-day or full day off without having to burn a vacation day.
It mostly works out in the end.
Programmer.
I actually put in a bit less than 40 hours in the office. Average in the time outside that I think about my current assignment and make notes and plans, and the limitations on my free time during the two weeks of every four that I am on call, and that when I am awakened in the middle of the night while on call it takes two to three hours to fix it, oh . . . maybe six to eight hours a week.
I am a computer scientist specializing in industrial automation and robotics.
I am one of the two poor souls who voted 20-25 hours a week unpaid overtime.
Yesterday was a good example, I left home at 0500, arrived at the lab at 0600, worked through lunch until 1730, went to a wedding rehearsal (who the heck has an outdoor wedding in 100 degree heat — ah but I digress), got back to a hotel nearby for a WebEx remote access session with my colleagues in the Philippines from 2100 until about 2330.
That was a 13 hour day and is on the high end for a day’s work at my company.
Average it out to 11 hours and you get 55 hours a week.
But Wait! There’s more! I also work at least 6 hours over the weekend from my home.
So that is something like 60-62 hours a week.
Yeah, my dear bride just LOVES this job.
And that is when I am not on assignment.
When I am out on the road (like my teammates in the Philippines) I work 14 hours a day.
On at 0700, out at 2100. Just enough time to crawl back to the hotel, have a beer and a shot and then collapse (hopefully in a bed) until dawn the next morning.
It is very fortunate that I truly enjoy what I do for a living because the hours are brutal.
>25
I have no set hours when I’m supposed to be at work other than a meeting or two each week. It’s a temporary position, 1-3 years, and the more publications and projects I can put on my CV for the next job, the better.
It’s really not that hard. Anyone who works only 40 hours/week and complains about money should get a second job. Grad school was 72 h weeks minimum, and that was less stressful than undergrad.
I’m a chemist.
I picked 6-10. I’m a general manager of a car wash company with two locations and a home office in an adjacent state. But the 6-10 is kinda misleading. My job follows me everywhere, while I’m at home, on vacation or whatever. I get hourly updates via text message from our store’s servers that help me keep a handle on labor, watch our car counts and sales dollars per car, etc.
There’s also the issue of mechanical failures. No matter where I am if we get shut down for any reason, I have to go fix the situation. And then there’s the fun times when an employee fails to lock a door at night, the wind blows it open and the alarm goes off. Guess who ADT calls? Guess who has to drive 30 minutes at 2am to lock the door and apologize to the police?
This is the worst part of my job IMO. I cannot escape it, and its become so ingrained in me that even if I’m on vacation (and I’ve only taken one in 5 years, other than my appendectomy) I worry and call the stores to make sure everything is all right.
The car wash business sure is funny.
I’m a software developer in the banking services industry. I picked one to five. It’s usually none, but the products I work on have features that change behavior at 5 PM, 7 PM, 9 PM and midnight, so I sometimes need to test these features after hours. Project deadlines also sometimes cause me to work longer hours. If my extra hours are especially long and become obvious to management, I get extra vacation days sometimes.
I’m scheduled for 39 hours per week. Sometimes, I get in at 9:30 and leave at 5. Other times I get in at 8:00 and leave at 7:00. It’s not something that someone else is requiring of me. I set my own schedule, essentially, and just take whatever time I want to leisurely get my job done.
In other words, I got it good, and that’s no lie.