Exactly! Seriously, where are the bread and roses? Let’s continue to overwork and underpay America’s working class. It’s working so well currently at stimulating the growth of our economy and helping average folk live the American dream.

No, salary doesn’t have to bet set on a 40 hour basis and there are certainly some times when significantly greater than 40 hours is the only sane option. However, those times are certainly the rare exception. Though as I said earlier, I don’t think legislation is the appropriate fix. Greater job mobility and economic dynamism are the fixes. Through a variety of ways, we have been slowly eating away at those (credentialism, purple squirrel syndrome, minimum wage hikes, experience fetishes, etc).

Well there’s also the fact that scheduled maintenance, updates, and patches to high availability systems are generally expected to be done outside of normal office hours and / or on weekends, and the IT guys still need to be working during normal office hours.

For some business, overtime isn’t any kind of “mode” its a necessity of doing business.

Not everyone runs strictly 9-5. But there is not enough happening outside of normal office hours to justify extra employees for extra shifts.

Of course many IT professionals in the kinds of roles most likely to require overtime actually get higher base salaries based on the expectation of work weeks greater than 40 hours.

Salary doesn’t have to be set on a 40 hour week basis.

That example is still an example of a failure mode. The urgency/unpredictability of the mode doesn’t negate the mode.

Oh for Christ’s sake.

Do you understand my point?

“In my view, overtime is a failure mode. It means you blew your estimates of time, schedule and resources.”

Overtime may be a failure mode in your line of work, that doesn’t mean it’s a failure mode for everyone.

I did IT work for an electric utility for many years. Many systems have to be kept running 24/7. No system ever built by humans is 100% reliable. Systems fail, and when the fail in the middle of the night, someone has to get out of bed and fix it.

On the one hand, I understand the “flexibility” argument. It’s one my wife has made many times. I don’t like clocking in and out (as I do now) and I understand the benefit to employers and managers of wage cost predictability, where payroll is more of an overhead expense rather than being like an electric bill that can spike.

On the other hand, however, I work in media production, and for me, I’ve always seen “exempt” salary positions as a sucker’s play.

In my view, overtime is a failure mode. It means you blew your estimates of time, schedule and resources. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen, or that it shouldn’t happen, or that someone should get fired if it does happen. My sort of work is notoriously hard to predict. The point is this is a line that should be understood – if you’re consistently running up overtime bills, something’s not being done right. Failure should hurt, and it should hurt the one who fails.

Unpaid OT means that check, that signal, is gone. It makes failure “free”, painless for the executive who blithely overpromises on a contract to make the sale – but not the coder or artist who now has less time for her family.

Male bovine excrement.

I work in IT while I make 100K/year now, I started 19 years ago at 35K. Being non-exempt would have been a pain in the ass. I liked not having to clock in and out, not having to track my time down to the minute.

This is clearly a net positive for employees and a struggle for employers. Just a side note, I work in HR. It’s not like we are going to layoff all of our supervisors. Most likely they will be classified “Salaried – Non-exempt” and we will focus on cutting out job responsibilities that aren’t important.

The shift will be toward time management. The new costs are very controllable. Just like in 2004 when everyone called fowl to the changes, we are seeing the same thing happen now. The impact is minimal at best. A well managed business has nothing to fear. A poorly managed business had much to fear even without this new regulation.

Good luck all.

Side note: I am salaried but would not be directly impacted by this litigation.