"You are an IBM employee 100% of the time"
What a joke - hope the salary makes this indentured servitude worth it.
What a joke - hope the salary makes this indentured servitude worth it.
And it really has the tone of just because you do it on your own time, with your own personal email as a “hobby” doesn’t mean you can use it as a loophole to get around restrictions IBM employees might have.
So, for example, if IBM isn’t allowed to contribute to a specific project for legal or contractual reasons, an employee doing so “in their own time” would not be a defensible argument.
If I want to fix a bug in an esoteric Scheme implementation OR a bug in a JDK or PHP I have to ask for permission even though it is on my own time. I already volunteer more time than I am paid to my employer, but I have to ask for permission for something they have literally no interest in.
This is bullshit.
It's not unreasonable to review and modify the proposed contract that an employer offers. As skilled employees who's services are in demand, you've got a good chance of them coming to the table on that.
-signed,
Arthur Collé
That might be OK within the parameters of their delusional mindset, but it's still fucked up and should not be allowed.
It is expected and known that if you do something like respond to a 0130 in the morning emergency and work the issue until 0430, then go to sleep, that you're going to sleep until whenever you wake up in the mid afternoon and probably not be useful for any other tasks that day.
I should point out that the salaried employees expected to respond to such things are compensated appropriately, and the general practice is to have a group of people so that each person is only on-call for some portion of each month.
The rank and file NOC employees and fiber splicers, field crews, field technicians are hourly employees and get overtime for incidents as described above. Depending on the state and labor laws they're also paid an hourly rate simply for being on-call, even if nothing happens, for the duration of their on-call rotation week(s).
I was just trying to highlight that I personally hate "core hours" and that if I'm on a marathon coding session from 9pm to 4am, and I'm intermittently unavailable from some arbitrary time (say 11:15am to 11:50am) and then I get a bunch of messages from bosses saying "where were you??" and I then explain that I was actually writing code, point to some commits and say "see? I did all this stuff" and they say "you are expected to work from 9am to 6pm" it feels like a slap in the face. I think good management should accept that people aren't robots (unless there is an outage, fair enough) and consider people's working preferences in their decisions.
Anyways, I'm sure you have some awesome war stories with deployments/maintenance events. You should share them sometime :D
I was gearing my response in terms of what seems reasonable to expect... but yeah I'm sure everyone would try to stretch themselves to absorb more capital.
Hmm, do they? It's not in my contract, and (unfortunately) the labour law in Ontario for my profession doesn't support it either. We are expected to be "deliverable based" I think, rather than effort/work based. IANAL etc, but my observation is that Hourly employees are compensated for their hours; but it's less straightforward for salaried workers.
I'm in IT, and IIRC IT is one of the professions where salaried FTEs are not entitled to overtime in Ontario, but all of the salaried FTE contracts I've ever signed since the mid 90s had a specified number (usually 40) of working hours.
If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
If you even go to your secret other home you haven't told them about in another state (or worse, another country), and that creates tax withholding obligations in that state, they may not fire you, but they will be very displeased.
Does your contract actually say this explicitly? Mine doesn't and I'm not sure it'd even be enforceable if it did.
> If you instead go to another job at the end of your eight hours, they'll fire you.
You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Now, it is true that this isn't common in software development jobs, but employment contracts for software development jobs aren't magic -- they're pretty much the same as any other employment contract.
(It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
I am also floored that someone actually thinks that their job is something they're paid to do 24/7.
It doesn't say, of course, that I'm supposed to go home. I can go to the bar, the library, the bowling alley, whatever. But it does say that I can't hold a second paid job (and it does demand that I truthfully tell them where I live). I am very much being paid not to work a second job.
Maybe you aren't! But I am, this is fairly normal for salaried positions in America, it's almost certainly enforceable, and it's something I willingly signed and accepted when I took this job.
I am aware there are a large number of people working non-salaried jobs who work multiple jobs. This thread is specifically about salaried jobs.
More relevantly to the thread, my contract also says that any work I do which is related to my employer's actual business is owned by my employer, whether or not I do it on work time or at work. I paid actual lawyers to review that portion of the contract before I signed it, and they told me it is absolutely enforceable. In this case, the question is whether an IBM employee can hack on an IBM-authored, IBM-maintained driver for IBM computers, contributing to which used to be part of their job on the side. It would be absolutely defensible for IBM to say they own this work regardless of when it happens, and it would be frankly surprising if the employment contract did not say that.
If this sounds to you like shit sandwich, that's because it is one, even if some people manage to make it work with less hours than norm.
moonlighting clauses are fairly standard and I'd be surprised if your contract doesn't include one.
> You are aware that there is a fairly large number of people who work multiple jobs, right? And that they usually don't ask permission to do so?
Yes, people violate their employment contracts.
> (It's also probably not legal to fire someone for working a second job, at least here in Australia.)
The enforceability of moonlight contracts may vary. For example working at a software company and moonlighting as a barista is less likely to be enforceable than working at a software company and moonlighting at another (or moonlighting as a freelance developer), at least in the US, the second is probably a violation.
Not that this matters in the US since you're usually at will anyway.
Incentivize people to take on-call time and those who are fit will take it.
I for one am perfectly capable of advanced software engineering work but I am NOT capable of compromising my sleep without causing serious heart arrythmias. Some other person might have to deal with a baby. Some other person might sleep early and do meditation at that hour because it helps prevent panic attacks during the day. Everyone is different, and personal time and rest time should be respected. There is so much behind the curtain of off-work time that employers don't see, and don't need to see, they just need to respect that time.
But in my experience, every single place I've worked, has had insane on call hours. And you were ALWAYS expected to do your normal work on top of the on call hours and you were NEVER given time to fix the issue that woke you up in the middle of the night.
Until the actually engineers/developers are in charge of their own schedules on call shifts will be fucking bullshit.
If it's just a question of product uptime then you should have enough people and pay people extra to be on-call. And don't deploy things at 5pm on a Friday.
No, because if you have a $90k salary and job duties that qualify for wage and hour exemption under FLSA and any applicable state labor law at that salary, then, there is no minimum hourly wage.
That’s what it means to be exempt from wage and hour rules.
For FLSA, “computer related” work is exempt at a salary of just over $35k.
MY current job has me on "salary" but they require me to work 40 hours a week... and have a time clocking program.
They aren't willing to pay me overtime even when I am contacted (with urgency) on the weekends and after hours...
That’s what a combination of salaried employment with pay and job duties qualifying for FLSA exemption is, in effect.
> Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...
Every company I've worked for has had it this way.
Assuming the outside work was performed on the employee's own time/equipment and doesn't compete with the employer's business, such contracts would be unenforceable in California. See section 2870 of the California Labor Code: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
The rule actually encompasses more than simple competition, but in any case work on OS components for an alternative (and therefore competing) OS for the employer’s hardware for which they also sell proprietary OS software does compete with the employer’s business, so... (The particular thing the employee was denied permission to work on seems to be VNIC for IBM Power)
> (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer or ...
I am not a lawyer, but I think it would not be unreasonable to believe that work on the kernel would be related to IBM's business (like RedHat).
Its not just that it doesn't compete with the employer's business but if it is related to the employer's business.
Furthermore, while the own time/equipment is there, there is also trade secret information mentioned beyond the time and equipment constraint.
Funnily enough I release some of my work under BSD-style licenses while company stuff is all GPL :D
[2 sidenotes though: 1) I'm in the EU, and 2) a previous job, working on the very exact same open source project, had a clause like that.]
I think that's why there are lots of startups in california.
In other states, employers in some cases can own everything, up to and including ideas in your head.
I don't know an example state that is the other side of the coin, pro-employer, but maybe texas? (uneducated guess)
I happen to be an IBM employee. I don't WORK 24x7 (well, not most weeks... ;), but "an IBM employee" is a state flag permanently assigned to me until explicitly changed:). I don't even feel it's debatable from a strictly semantic point of view. (I am many other things as well, FWIW:)
Hopefully starting from point of agreement, if at 9pm I log on to hacker news and start singing praises to IBM or complaining about its work or musing on its share price or revealing insider information, it would be a relevant disclosable piece of information that "I'm an IBM employee", no?
You are subject to IBM trade secret law 100% of the time. Just because you only get paid for 8 hours of work a day doesn't mean you can use your 9th hour to tell people all about trade secrets. You are, in fact, paid to adhere to the terms of your employment contract 24/7.
The people in charge are sociopaths.