[nibbleshifter]

Not really.

I'm paid to work 40h/week.

Am I going to be expected to be working more than that? If so, I'll pass.

If there's occasional overtime, sure, fine. But do I get paid extra for it? Does it get banked into extra PTO?

And so on, stuff I ask prospective employers in the first conversation.

[bastardoperator]

This isn't how salaried position work though, not in the US anyways. You will get paid X if you work 10 hours a week or X if you work 50 hours a week. There is no difference in pay. Would you be open to losing pay? Do you want to be accountable for every single hour of work you do? Most don't.

[nibbleshifter]

I'm not in the US, but I work for a US based company.

My contract specifically says I work 40h/week, have X days off/year (outside of statutory holidays) as PTO, etc.

This means that 5 days a week, I am at my keyboard, available on Slack, etc for 8 hours per day.

Hours are logged in a time tracking application (including time spent when there was nothing to do), and overages get added automatically to holiday time.

[bastardoperator]

Thats a contract position, not a salaried position. Most tech job in the US do not pay hourly. A salaried position says you will make X per year including benefits like unlimited PTO, 401K matching, reserved stock units, discount stock purchasing program, life insurance, medical insurance, etc... There is also no logging of time because your pay cannot be raised or reduced on a weekly basis.

[joe5150]

jobs on salaries still have an expectation of how many hours you will work and some provide PTO comp for "overtime". tracking this often does mean filling out a time sheet or punching a clock, even though those times don't directly figure into your paycheck.

[bastardoperator]

This is just simply not true for most tech workers, especially here in California. I'd argue most companies have moved to "unlimited PTO" so that workers are not accruing vacation. Businesses no longer want to have millions of dollars outstanding on their books when it comes to vacation time. I've worked for two Fortune 15 companies, done an IPO, and have consulted with all the big names in the valley, no one is clocking in or filling out time sheets, in fact doing so would put the employer in a precarious/legal situation.

Maybe it's different elsewhere, but where all the tech companies are, it just doesn't work the way you're describing it. If you're being forced to punch a timecard and salaried, I would contact an attorney.

[joe5150]

notwithstanding the norm in big tech, what nibbleshifter described is pretty common for salary-earning employees in other industries.

[alsetmusic]

> Maybe it's different elsewhere, but where all the tech companies are, it just doesn't work the way you're describing it. If you're being forced to punch a timecard and salaried, I would contact an attorney.

When I was salaried at a FAANG, they had us start clocking to pay OT when we exceeded 40h, which was most people much of the time. It was a way to keep the pay competitive. This was ten years ago, so no idea if that’s still a thing.

[Amezarak]

I've been in the workforce for more than a decade and every salaried job was a minimum of 40 hours. At best you could comp time for the next week, but only up to so many hours.

If you were putting less than 40 hours a week in your timesheet, you had to use some form of paid time off (holiday, vacation, sick) or simply not get paid.

[germandiago]

This is a difficult topic. We evolved to the 40h/week mentality. This is a big luck for us.

I think things should be more based on goals than on time itself, honestly. What I mean is: if you work 40h but you do not deliver anything, how is that good compared to someone that in 32 delivers more? We have to put ourselves on the side of the employer also, even if some people hate them.

[d4mi3n]

This is a management problem, not an employee problem. Figuring out if I can be outperformed by someone working less hours than me is irrelevant to my relationship to my employer. I'd go further to say that it's irrelevant barring frequency of the event having an impact on the broader job market. For any team, you will have a range of performance. For any individual, you will have different work styles.

This is normal. This is OK.

Asking an employee make this a consideration when negotiating with an employer is a dereliction of duty on behalf of the hiring manager and difficult for the candidate to judge due to information asymmetry. If you're building a team, you should know what kind of talent fits on it and make an offer on those merits. That's what being a hiring manager entails.

[germandiago]

There is always a feedback cycle also I think. You can tell your manager why something could work or not. The manager is the responsible from the direction POV but it is also true that we are responsible to some extent of how we perform. Maybe not from an executive or strategic POV but yes from a deliver-what-you-are-asked for POV.

What I mean, all in all, is: we all should care. That's why it is called an organization.

I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.

[d4mi3n]

I don't disagree with the fact that we should manage our performance (and career growth!), but this is a problem for after one is hired. I'm not even sure how you'd go about putting reasonable or realistic expectations on somebody's performance until you interview them and make them an offer for a specific title or role.

Even then, expectations of what a role does vary from one org to another. I don't think it's realistic to have someone outside of an organization say "I'm a senior/staff engineer" and for that person to have consistent expectations on what that statement means from for a potential employer from one interview to the next.

> I agree with job about the job of a manager. I am just telling you that each one has her responsibility. All of us.

No disagreement there. My intended point is what appropriate expectations are at various points of a potential employees tenure at an organization. A interviewee has no responsibilities: they have no employment contract and no expectations on them other than those a hiring team or manager brings into the room. The responsibilities come after the interviewee agrees to their job responsibilities and signs an employment contract.