Example: You work 60 hours a week for BigCo. You have a fancy Director of BlahBlah title. You receive a salary of $500k. You spend 49 percent of your time performing truly managerial tasks. The other 51 percent of your time, you’re pitching in to help with your subordinates’ production-level work. Guess what? You’re non-exempt 100% of the time, and your employer owes you 20 hours of overtime each week, at an approximate rate of $240 per hour. This isn’t a kooky law school hypothetical, by the way: actual employees have sued and won on similar facts.
A good indicator is "do you have to fill out a timesheet". If you do, that means you're probably paid an hourly wage, and you should be paid overtime; if you don't, you're probably salaried and overtime-exempt. As usual, it's more complicated than that if you get into the weeds (e.g. in the news article linked in the comment you're replying to), and having a lawyer interpret your employment contract is probably the most authoritative way to figure that out if you feel your situation is unusual.
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Overtime for an hourly exempt worker is 1.0x.
Overtime for a salary exempt worker is not defined.
Overtime for an hourly non-exempt worker is 1.5x.
Overtime for a salary non-exempt worker is poorly defined.
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An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt. One working under that amount is non-exempt.
The specifics of how the FLSA applies to computer professionals is described in https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17g-overtime-sa...
> Exempt computer employees may be paid at least $684 on a salary basis or on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.
No it's 1.5x (minimum), just like hourly.
To find the hourly wage that the 1.5x applies to, you divide their salary for the pay period by the number of non-overtime paid hours in the pay period.
> An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt.
Under federal law, but maybe not under state law (CA, for instance, has a much higher threshold for computer software workers.)
Edit to your edit:
> my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer
Your generalization is frequently incorrect, because billing by the hour is extremely common. The DOL has a very readable website that explains exemptions. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
Some of them do so for accounting reasons. Not because it determines their pay.