CF's Wealth Distribution

[strollin]

I'll have to agree with strollin on the minor point that many if not most salary workers do unpaid overtime. For a lot of companies, it's a way to save money on mid-level management-- if they have to pay overtime hours to their managers, they'd go broke in a hurry. ...

I disagree about unpaid OT being a way to save money. Generally speaking a salaried employee is a "knowledge worker" with an unstructured routine and a hourly employee's work is routine with set standards and rules. The "knowledge worker" is paid a certain salary commensurate with their knowledge and is independent from how many hours that are worked. An hourly employee is paid to labor at a job for x many hours at y rate. In the US, the terms are "exempt" (not paid OT) for salaried employees and "non-exempt" (paid OT) for hourly workers and there is a legal definition as to which category a particular job falls into based on the actual duties performed.

When I responded to the poll, I looked at my annual salary and divided by 52, then again by 40 to determine my approximate hourly rate. I didn't take into consideration any perks or benefits such as stock options, bonuses, paid time off, etc...

 

[Dngrsone]

I disagree about unpaid OT being a way to save money. Generally speaking a salaried employee is a "knowledge worker" with an unstructured routine and a hourly employee's work is routine with set standards and rules. The "knowledge worker" is paid a certain salary commensurate with their knowledge and is independent from how many hours that are worked. An hourly employee is paid to labor at a job for x many hours at y rate. In the US, the terms are "exempt" (not paid OT) for salaried employees and "non-exempt" (paid OT) for hourly workers and there is a legal definition as to which category a particular job falls into based on the actual duties performed.

I have a real-world example-- a departmental manager who "owns" ten installations, and needs to divide significant time between two different sites with quarterly visits to the other eight. He spends on average some 8 hours a week in airports going between those two sites. He works at least 40 hours a week besides and is on call 24/7. Does the time spent in travel count? Do the once-every-other-weekend four hour phone relays count? How about the interrupted vacations?

I don't know how much this manager makes, but I'm pretty sure it isn't 6-figure...

 

[sniperviper21]

21.50/hr normal
32.25/hr OverTime pay.

This past pay it was 103hrs, i officially HATE taxes.....
Work your ass off and half the OT dosnt even count due to taxes.

I live a decent luxury life i guess, but after school loans, other payments, rent, utilities, gas, food, insurance blah blah blah I do about as well as any other average income person in the US.

Id give ya rep Root, but it says i cant for now lol.
Nice to see someone here has intelligence lol

 

[superman22x]

I'm still finding it hard to conceive that you guys have no idea what you're time is worth.

Some of you are talking about working 40 - 60 hour weeks, away from home, being on call 24x7 and seem to have no idea what your time is worth.

I have no idea how much your job fulfils you, but with no idea of your remuneration how do you know that you're not better off working down at the golden arches? working fixed hour days, of less time, with less stress, having more free time to spend with your family, and with no idea of what your take home is.

How do you know whether you'd get paid more or less for this much simpler life?

On the point of overtime, it's not the case that salaried workers cannot work overtime.
I would assume that everyone here has a contract, and inside that contract would be a section on contracted hours.

If you choose to come into the office early, and if you choose to stay late, and if you choose to check your mails at home or at the weekend, that's not overtime.
That's volunteering or being really committed.

And when you go to your boss and say that you worked all weekend can you be paid for it, they are going to say no, because they didn't authorise it, they didn't budget for it, and you can't just choose when to work overtime... -seriously, how many of us if we could just choose to stay later at work and get paid more would just to earn a little more money? -and how is any company going to forecast this?

If you find that there aren't enough hours in the day to do your job then that's something that you should take up with your managers, if you're too scared to do that, or you don't want to do that then you can choose to spend all your free time working.

staff shortages should be the companies problem, not yours!

Before anyone gets smart about it.
Yes, in most contracts there will be a clause that allows for some unpaid overtime.

This is covered in the complying to any reasonable request.

It would not be unreasonable for your boss to ask you to stay 10 minutes late one day to finish a project rather than waiting till the next day. it's even not unreasonable to ask you to work a 12 hour day one day rather than an 8 hour day, and work a 4 hour day the next to give you back the time.

It is unreasonable to expect you to work 4 hours extra a day, everyday.

It might be that you have to go very far above and beyond the call of duty if someone else has left, filling in for them, and this may be for an extended period of time, but it shouldn't be forever!

Here at GM, engineers have levels. A level 5 is the lowest level for an engineer. Often times you will hire in at level 5 or 6, and 7 might be about the highest level you get to. Each level also has 3 sections in it, A B and C. I know one or two 8th level engineers and they have been working there for 35+ years. At that level, it's pretty much expected you work 70 hours a week.

 

[root]

Here at GM, engineers have levels. A level 5 is the lowest level for an engineer. Often times you will hire in at level 5 or 6, and 7 might be about the highest level you get to. Each level also has 3 sections in it, A B and C. I know one or two 8th level engineers and they have been working there for 35+ years. At that level, it's pretty much expected you work 70 hours a week.

OK, I do accept that for some jobs, hours above and beyond are the normal, but it's still pretty black and white.

If you're working an average of 70 hour weeks. (14 hours a day five days a week -when do you guys sleep?) and you work 50 weeks of the year, then your average yearly working hours are ~3500hours.

Take your salary figure, divide that by 3500 and you get your hourly rate.
If you earn $40,000 a year then you get $11 an hour (you probably would get the same hourly rate working in Mc Donalds!). -in fact converted that amount is below the legal minimum wage in this country.

If you earn $100,000 a year, then your hourly rate is around $30 an hour.

Here at GM, engineers have levels. A level 5 is the lowest level for an engineer.

what happened to levels 1 - 4? or are they reserved for different types of job? (like level 1 may be a janitor?)

It's the fact that most salary jobs involve more than 40 hours a week. And it's unpaid overtime. That's one reason why it's salary pay, not hourly... Hourly pay has hardly any reflection on overall income. Just ask what our monthly, weekly, or yearly income is.

I suppose the crux of what we're coming down to here is the idea that you probably shouldn't look at work in terms of time and overtime if you're an exempt status employee.
You have a total work time and a total wage packet. if anything this should make it easier to work out than if there is the confusion of non standard over time rate pay worked at regular intervals. (though the possibility of bonuses company cars etc can muddy the mix, but these all have very easily defined values too!)

for example a company car that would be costing you $1000 a year to insure + $166 to lease (that's lease not loan repayments as it's generally cheaper to lease, and similarly you won't own the car at the end of it).

Anyway, that package of perks is worth an additional $3000 a year.

If you're a live-in employee then clearly your perk is worth the average rental price in your area.

If that total work is an average of 30 hours a week or 70 hours a week then it'd make no difference to the sums! you're still looking at yearly pay, divided by yearly hours worked.

Monthly or yearly take home would probably give a much better idea of levels of wealth, but not levels of worth.
A good example of that is the burger flipper who works ten hours a days 7 days a week earning $10 an hour (monthly take home ~3000) ($100 a day 30 days a month)

Compared to the consultant engineer who works 1 hour in a month and gets $3000 for that one hours work.

They both earn the same in a month, but one is clearly worth more, (or rather one of them has skills that are offered at a higher premium).

 

[strollin]

Here at GM, engineers have levels. A level 5 is the lowest level for an engineer. Often times you will hire in at level 5 or 6, and 7 might be about the highest level you get to. Each level also has 3 sections in it, A B and C. I know one or two 8th level engineers and they have been working there for 35+ years. At that level, it's pretty much expected you work 70 hours a week.

Guess I'll stay where I'm at and not go to work at GM. I certainly don't work 70 hours a week on a continuous basis, once in awhile when there's a deadline looming but I probably average about 42 hours per week.

A few years back I was interviewing for a job as a sr software engineer and I asked if there was some unwritten expectation to work 60-70 hr weeks. I liked the answer I got which was, "No expected amount of hours. In fact, if you're caught up on your work and feel like taking off on a Friday afternoon to go to the beach, I'd expect you to do it." I got that job and worked there six years.

 

[cboucher]

Working 70 hours a week no matter what the pay, salary or hourly, is a good way to get yourself burned out. Down time is important...

 

[superman22x]

Guess I'll stay where I'm at and not go to work at GM. I certainly don't work 70 hours a week on a continuous basis, once in awhile when there's a deadline looming but I probably average about 42 hours per week.

A few years back I was interviewing for a job as a sr software engineer and I asked if there was some unwritten expectation to work 60-70 hr weeks. I liked the answer I got which was, "No expected amount of hours. In fact, if you're caught up on your work and feel like taking off on a Friday afternoon to go to the beach, I'd expect you to do it." I got that job and worked there six years.

Like I said, people that work those hours are fairly high up. Pay is def 6 figures, you get a brand new car every six months(borrow), great benefits, 5 weeks of paid vacation/year as well as holidays I think... There are benefits to working for a big company. But there isn't as much freedom.

My boss is at the top of a 6th level as far as I know. I've come in a 5:45am and he's been there. I've left at 5pm, and he was there. He comes early and stays late, and most of the other workers in the office do that as well. Weekends are paid overtime though. Around $45/hr saturdays and $60/hr sundays. The UAW guys are making much more though.

 

[CrackerJacker1]

i've been deployed for months working on a busy flightline 12hrs a day. 6 Days a week. It usually ends up being 14 Hr days. It's not worth the money at all. I still get paid 33500$ a yr. fml

 

[strollin]

The idea that you must consistently work 60-70 hours a week doesn't sit well with me. I actually left a job a few years back because of it. I was working at IBM doing custom application programming. A customer could contract with us to develop an application to do whatever and we would build it. Upper management came up with a minimum number of hours you had to bill the customer per year. Things like vacation, sick days, holidays, meetings, classes, etc... cannot be billed to the customer. When you subtracted out the non-billable hours it was apparent that you had to work x number of OT hours per week to meet the billable hours goal. Not only that, but they forced us to use our lunch hour for dept meetings so as to not lose billable hours. I ran out of work and asked my manager for additional projects to keep busy while working OT. Instead of additional projects, I was told to just bill the customer for more hours. I refused to bill the customer for hours that I didn't work on their projects so my appraisal rating was lowered. I left that job 15 years ago and have never been told I had to work x number of hours OT/week since then.