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by bastardoperator 1427 days ago
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.
2 comments

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.

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.
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.
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.

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

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.