Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄 is a user on elekk.xyz. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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Noëlle the 8-Bit🏳️🌈🎄
@noelle
When I was younger, I was very excited about the idea of going from being an hourly employee to being a salaried employee. Getting a salary instead of wages meant you were Getting Up There!
Nope.
Getting a salary instead of wages means you get a constant amount no matter how many hours you put in, so your corporate overlords can feel comfortable asking you to overwork yourself for no additional compensation.
@noelle Your work contract doesn't set a fixed number of weekly hours? Over here (Belgium) the de facto standard for salaried employees is to work 38h per week; overtime is either paid separately or converted to paid days off, or both.
@jkb There's no legal standard in the US and companies will routinely exploit this. It's especially true in the software-development industry, where 7-day, 100-hour "crunch weeks" aren't uncommon but don't draw any extra pay.
@noelle And to think that many european CS/IT students and professionals dream of going to the US and work there. We seem to have it way better at home, between legal protections and market asymetry.
@elomatreb @noelle Haha yes, but that's mostly because VC in Europe are way less... how to word it politely... enthusiastic than their American counterparts.
@noelle @jkb There is actually a legal standard for this, it just sucks.
https://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17a_overview.htm
At least the law was updated in 2016 to raise the floor from $455/wk to a minimum of 40th percentile of full-time non-hourly worker wages in the lowest wage Census Region ($913 as of 2016), and with automatic update provisions starting in 2020.
But that's still really low for a lot of areas, tbh...
And, the Highly Compensated Employees rule was updated the same way, and is now $134,004.
@noelle I flipped _back_ to hourly about four years ago becoming a consultant, and… gosh it's annoying rearranging things so that you can help kids get places and go to doctors and dentists and what not. So I miss that part of the salaried life.
But I totally hear you. I think the key part of a _good_ salaried job is respectful employers who won't do that shit to you. But those are super hard to find.
@noelle salary is a trap with open jaws
