I'm an "exempt" employee. That means that I'm exempt from the fair labor laws.

It means that, for example, I don't get docked in pay if I work a few less hours this week. It means I don't punch a timeclock.

We just had a bit of a big deal about this at work. Some of us were taking parts of days off, and marking them as such in our system: "I took two hours off today." HR told us to stop. Apparently, there's some kind of a legal/liability issue they were getting into, where exempt employees don't have to do that. We can just take a couple hours off, without using up vacation time to do it. (I don't know the details about it. I can't tell you how to make your HR department see it this way. To me, it was just one more of those random HR policy changes. But the point is, exempt is a different set of rules, and some of those rules are pretty nice.)

Exempt also means, once in a while, that I get called in after hours, or that I work unpaid overtime. I accept that, as long as it doesn't happen too often. I accept the bad part of the deal in order to also get the good part.

If you refuse to work unpaid overtime, are you also willing to let go of the good parts of the deal?

It would depend on company policy. If company policy requires you to take PTO for a doctor's or dentists appointment, then I'd only work 40 hours at that company. If the company doesn't account for exempt time, then they may get more than 40 hours of work out of me.

Regarding exempt employees having to take PTO, recent court challenges in California have come out in favor of the employer. See Rhea V. General Atomics. http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ca-court-of-appeal/1673316.html

I used to have difficulty explaining to people why I was unwilling to work unpaid overtime, but I've finally settled on just saying "It's a moral issue; I think it is wrong." This seems to shut people up, at least, though they probably think I'm some kind of nuts Marxist.

Asking for more labor in return for no more pay is wrong and allowing this kind of immorality to happen by willingly participating in it is also wrong. Therefore, living a moral life is incompatible with unpaid overtime.

It's interesting to note that, in california, even if you are salaried as a programmer, you may still be due overtime if you earn a little less then 86k a year.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/LC515-5.pdf

This article is spot on. American businesses are not hanging by a thread, they are beating a horse drawing an overloaded cart, and don't care if the horse drops dead. They think they can just get another.

In today's business environment, everything seems to be both urgent and important. I think that a lot of that is due to who is in charge and what they think is pressing at the time. Everything cannot be urgent and important, only some small percentage of what needs to be done should be labeled as such.

The only way to fix this in the short term is for everyone to start saying "No" to chronic overtime. I define chronic overtime to be a work week which exceeds 48 hours over a 6 week average. Maybe then, companies will decide which tasks are really worthwhile and only direct efforts to them, or if they are understaffed, hire enough staff to get the important stuff done.

In the longer term, we need to reform the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to eliminate unpaid overtime except in unusual situations. The European Working Time Directive is an excellent example of model legislation. We just have to keep nagging our congresspersons, and beat back the US Chamber of Commerce's lobbying efforts.

It's especially due to the lack of desire to be contacted outside of work hours that I do not have my work email configured to forward to my personal emails or to alert me on my phone or any other damn fool thing.

You've got to train the bozos that, once you're off, you're off.

IMHO emails shouldn't be raising notifications no matter what time it is. If you need to reach me synchronously, that's what chat is for.

For all the stories saying "I was forced to do 80-100 hour weeks for months", I wonder how often these employees say "I'll do it for one week because I want to support this team, but I'm sorry I have other obligations beyond that that limit me to working only a regular week with an occasional 2-3 hours overtime if needed". Maybe I'm biased but I have trouble envisioning an environment in which a manager would fire somebody for that.

I had an employer chide me for only working 40 hours a week. I was told "come on, there's programmers in Silicon Valley who sleep under their desks every night!".

At drinks after work, the co-founder of a startup complained about people leaving the co-working space at 5:00 every day. "What's the matter with them? Don't they like money?"

If you're having trouble envisioning that kind of environment, it means you're a good, empathetic person. And it means you've had the luck of only working for managers who believe in work/life balance and a healthy approach to the job. Hopefully their example sank in, because if you're not a manger already you're well on your way to being one of the good ones.

The idea of unpaid overtime for salaried employees is you do the overtime then take the hours off later in the week, so work 3 extra hours monday, take thursday morning off.

If you're not taking the hours off later than you're just working for free. Which, yes, is silly.