Big-ticket sales jobs can be just like this. You generally don’t work in an office, but from home, so there is no oversight to speak of. You set your own schedule. The job can be very intensive while you work on getting the deal, but once a decision is made there can be a month or so of tying things up that require you to be available, but doing very little. I remember one day when a contract was being finalized on the last day possible. I was the point of contact in case things went sideways so I sat by the phone all day and all I did was take one call requesting a change in language in one paragraph of the contract, and all I did was jot a few notes and forward it on to our legal department. Two minutes of work that day.
It can also be hard to schedule meetings back-to-back, so there are times when you fly in to a city one night, have a meeting the next morning, and have nothing on your schedule until the next afternoon. You can spend the rest of the day sitting by the hotel pool checking your email once an hour.
Of course, if you are behind on your quota those days are spent on the phone doping whatever you can to drum up business, but there are also times when you hit your yearly quota by July. You always try to make more money, but you really don’t have to if you don’t want to. You’re not going to get fired when you’re over 100% of your goal. What’s interesting is that they most successful salespeople are the ones who work the least, because they know how to schedule things right and don’t have a lot of screwups. Sometimes it’s a waste of time contacting clients because it’s their crazy time of year or they don’t have budgets finalized so they can’t make financial decisions. Calling people at these times just pisses off the potential client because you are wasting their time.
I work with educational technology, so my summers are really slow. You pay for it in early fall and April, May, and June.
I know a guy who sells corporate jets and his days are spent playing golf and getting drunk with his clients. If he makes two or three sales a year, he is a very wealthy man.
Someday I’ll do an “Ask the Sales Rep” post, because selling big ticket or enterprise-wide solutions is so, so different from what most people think of when picturing a salesperson. The job and the rules are the opposite of selling a commodity like cars or copiers or especially retail sales.
Really great answers everyone. Feel free to keep it going, though.
Going back to my experience, I remember being in an office where the only hourly workers were the receptionists - everyone else was salaried, but expected to actually bill a full time salary every pay period. There was one guy who more or less was there to serve one or two thick-walleted customers and didn’t really have much to do otherwise. I was told that an arrangement had been made where one of those customers had agreed to be billed for this guy’s downtime so that he wouldn’t have to be docked vacation time or salary pursuant to company policy if he wasn’t assigned enough work during a pay period to meet minimum expected hours, and that that this was something really special.
The “exempt employees must bill 40 hours on their timesheet” thing did often allow one to shift (“comp”) time across days as long as one got their work done and the total hours in the pay period equaled the required amount. For example, if you were on two week pay periods that started Sunday and ended the next Saturday, you could do a half day on the last Friday and work 4 hours on Saturday and they were ok with that. If you left after 4 hours on Friday but made up the hours on Sunday (which was in a different pay period), there was wailing and gnashing of teeth and charges against your vacation balance and if you want to take those 4 hours off later, you have to do it in Sunday’s pay period or else forfeit your extra hours. This meant that a super-busy month of 15 hour days to meet a special goal did not allow you to scale back the next month and work 4 hour days to relax during the downtime - you had to find something to do to meet 8 hours a day or else what the hell do you think they are paying you to do?
I think the overall idea of a salary is that it is expected that your work will take up “full time” hours (whatever the industry defines it as). Further, a salaried person is deemed to be a professional in that the job that is completed is not likely able to be quantified in hours devoted to that task. So in that sense, there may be days where you put in 2 hours and go home and other times where you are up all night on weekends and holidays due to a last minute deadline.
These things don’t happen for repetitive menial jobs like, say (and again to pick on them) janitors. The building needs cleaned X times per week. It takes Y hours to clean the building. You pay a man by the hour to clean the building. There are no “emergency” cleanings where he has to scrub furiously for 14 straight hours, nor is there a “down time” where the building just somehow stays clean and he can knock off early.
I realize that some companies use the term “salary” simply as a means to prevent having to pay overtime, but that’s not what it was intended for, and if they are too blatant about it, they run afoul of federal workplace law.
You can definitely have that kind of job in academia - my father is a professor, and his job is like that. Of course there are certain times when he has to be at work - he has to give lectures and tutorials, and be in his office occasionally to deal with students, and attend certain meetings. But outside of that, his work hours are totally up to him.
My gf is in advertising. There are people at the agency who play ping-pong, fly paper airplanes, drink, nap, etc. then they get an idea and do cool stuff with it. They may “work” a small percentage of the time; still, they would argue that creativity works best their way.
And I know a situation where someone is basically shifting money around. A family member has a “job”, comes in for appearance sake and gets a decent salary. I’m not an accountant, but apparently there are situations where it works.
I work a salary job for an arts organization that has definite peaks and valleys in terms of business. There will occasionally be weeks where I have very little that must be done and I’ll spend some of the extra time effing around. Other times I’m working full-out 70 hours or so a week, so the feeling around work is no one worries much about what you are up to during the quiet times.
My husband is an EMS helicopter pilot who will frequently only fly 5-6 hours in an 84-hour rotation. Most of the rest of the time he can fart around, watch TV, play games, whatever while waiting for a call to come in. During periods of bad weather he might not fly at all for a week.
I’m not so sure that that’s a common arrangement with salaried jobs. It works for the sort of jobs where customers or clients are billed an hourly fee in some way, but it doesn’t work so well for lots of other jobs- who does the HR manager ,sales manager or warehouse manager bill? They are only going to work in their own departments and it makes little sense to account for their salaries in any way other than have the entire salary come out of the department budget.
And just as an aside, if the company really docks pay if you are not assigned enough work to meet some minimum expected hours , then you are actually being treated as an hourly employee no matter how your pay rate is quoted. A company can require you to be present at work for a set number of hours (and require you to scrub toilets if your actual work doesn’t take up all of those hours) and they can fire you if you aren’t present for all of those hours , but they cannot dock an exempt employee’s pay unless the employee takes a full day off for reasons other than lack of work.
Anyone remember the ad about an uber-cool ISP or IT company that showed all the employees riding unicycles, juggling, meditating, playing ping-pong, with the narration “We are cool… we are leading edge… we are world-changers…” until it turned to the guy on the other end of the phone who finished the doped-out narration with, “…you are jerks who never answer your phone!”
The HR manager or a warehouse manager would have billed an Overhead or “General and Administrative” account. However, these accounts only paid out for the actual hours worked on departmental or corporate activities. So, if an employee spent a week where they worked 30 hours for a specific customer and 10 hours interviewing candidates, emptying office trashcans, and being the slide monkey at executive board meetings, he would charge 30 “direct” hours (where someone received a bill for the work) and 10 “indirect” hours. Management discouraged charging indirect accounts and I remember one time where an employee was told that a project that they were working on had been determined to not be an authorized activity under any charge code in the system and thus the time had to be made up within the pay period or else taken as vacation time.
robert columbia, your experience with salaried employees differs wildly from my perceptions.
Even the guys in my company who work back in the office and do have to sign a paper saying they “worked” 40 hours in a week regularly do not during downtime. If there are no nodes to process, they do nothing and get paid for it. When there is a lot of processing to do and all hell breaks loose with various different problems, they might work 60-80 hours a week.
Nominally they are supposed to work 40 hours per week but absolutely no one in the office is going around and checking on them and a lot of downtime is spent chatting about video games and sipping coffee and browsing the web and checking stocks.
So even though my own personal experience is kind of unique because I work out on a boat, even the guys in the office have it very similarly.
Whaaa..? I’ve never heard of a personal injury lawyer billing hourly. They work on contingency. That is, if you win, they get around 30% (whatever percent is set by state law). If you lose, they get no pay for their work at all.
Your link is bad. That links to a post about whether law school is hard.
And, I never heard of a lawyer not having enough work to fill all day, every day, and then some.
Sorry, I guess I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t speaking of your particular employer, I was speaking in general. Many (probably most) exempt jobs do not require particular customers to be billed for work. In addition to those I’ve mentioned, there are retail,restaurant and hotel managers, outside salespeople, office managers, in-house counsel , accountants, buyers etc. That’s just what I can think of offhand- I’m sure there are many,many more. Your experience is unusual - the whole point of an exempt position is that you are paid for the work and not for the hours it takes you to do it.
This
is probably not legal for an employer to require of any employee. Being required to make up time is a hallmark of an hourly position, but even hourly employees have to be paid for every hour they are at work, even if the employer decides after the fact that the time was spent on an unauthorized project.
My salary is a flat rate which covers every hour I work, whether it’s 25 hours for the week or 70 hours for the week. Overtime is not time and a half, it’s half my regular rate because the “time” is already covered by salary. It’s screwy as hell, but it’s legal (technically its called " the belo plan") so I do what I can to work as few hours as possible. Mondays and Fridays I typically only work 4-6 hours, but Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays I rarely work less than 8 hours a day and I frequently work more than 10.
I don’t feel bad punching out early when I get the chance because I really get screwed when we’re busy.
I’ve had oilfield jobs when, during slow periods of the year, my employer would rather keep paying us than lay us off so as not to lose us to its competitors.
I had many months where I was paid a very healthy salary to do absolutely nothing, day after day.
And we weren’t lazy. There literally wasn’t anything left to do. If there is no work then there is no work. And all those little things that needed doing but never got done? Yea, we finished those in the first month. You can only sweep a floor and polish every nook imaginable perhaps a dozen times before the exercise becomes ludicrous to all observers, the boss included.
We would have rather been working, actually, just to break the monotony, keep skills fresh, and keep the waistline in check.
It got to the point where they were just sending us on paid vacations, essentially. “We’ll call you when we need you. Oh, and here’s your paycheck.”
There’s also professional salaried jobs like mine (librarian) that are almost like an hourly job in that there’s a desk to be staffed. So you have to staff the desk. But you’re also exempt and you work comp time if you’re teaching a class outside of your normal hours. But you do have normal hours, because somebody gotta staff the desk. I’m sure there are other degreed professional situations that have something similar, yes?