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Are you supposed to get overtime pay?
6 comments- TAGS:overtime
- IT TOPICS:Careers, Government & Regulation
In my experience, the most controversial IT career topics are (in this order): offshoring, H-1B visas, age discrimination and overtime pay. Regarding the latter, there's a natural and human tendency to think that if you can be yanked out of a vacation (or out of bed or out of a movie theater) when paged to handle some IT crisis, or if you have to work a weekend for a system cutover or maintenance, then you should get overtime pay.
But it's more complicated than that.
This article over at CIO.com identifies six things you should know about overtime pay. The law (the Federal Labor Standards Act, or FLSA) determines who gets overtime pay -- and employers determine who's exempt from the law. So naturally employers have a bias towards classifying workers as exempt. But they're supposed to follow FLSA regulations regarding exemptions.
I think the first thing to understand is that, when it comes to figuring out whether you're covered or exempt, job titles don't matter. Only the job duties matter.
With that out of the way, consider whether the duties are repetitive and routine -- the worker follows strict orders, follows a checklist or standard procedure, etc. -- or whether the duties require "independent judgment." Employees doing the latter are exempt.
For example, installing security patches or operating computer hardware, which must be done following strict procedures and with little individual discretion, could fall under the FLSA.
Also, programmers and other software design professionals are exempt if they "earn at least $455 per week on a salaried basis," the article says. On the other hand, software debugging could be considered routine, "non-exempt" work.
So it pays to become educated about the FLSA.
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