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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

What's the legality of this? In many jurisdictions, at least my former one, you can't be made to work overtime I believe. I had a job where I had to sign something that said I agreed to work overtime (unpaid as a salaried employee) but understood I could refuse and be accommodated.

I know it's a startup so if that's what they want to do, cool (even if I think it's misguided) but I'd expect everyone would have to have some vested equity ie be an owner and not being forced to grind as an employee.

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Replying to myself: also, at least in my experience, if your job is digging ditches, making well formatted powerpoints like in consulting, or some similar mindless work, you can pretty much just add more hours and be productive. For brain work, it doesn't work that way and six days will get you less output than four. I'm pretty sure this is accepted wisdom.

So either they have a bunch of mindless grinding work to do that doesn't require autonomous thought, or they're going against accepted practice for working productively. I'd be concerned if I was an investor.

If I were an investor I'd have concerns about employee retention.

I assure you, you can't just add hours to dig more ditches after a point. You mess up if you get tired.

The only kind of work I have done where you could add hours was security guard, since you do almost nothing all day.

I'm pretty sure that even the concentration of a security guard will start to falter after 20 consecutive hours. That is probably going to be to the detriment of the security of whatever they were supposed to guard.

Ye well you need to sleep too. I just ment that you can do longer shifts than other occupations.

I worked 12h shifts, 13 shifts per month, and that is probably in the higher end of what's doable.

Some people got really strange from working at night. So it is probably not very healthy ...

It's only considered working "overtime" if you're working beyond the required hours for the role. And the job posting is pretty clear that the role is 6 days a week. It might not be your cup of tea, and the job description does a good job of screening you out before you even apply. I don't think there is any malpractice here.

Sorry to "uhm ackshually" you but software engineers, and many other professions to my knowledge, are exempt from overtime in the US regardless of what the job description is.

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...

What was your former jurisdiction?

Provided the employee is appropriately classified as except OR they are hourly and paid appropriate overtime rates, I'd expect they are ok. Maybe their hours don't surpass 40? More likely there's no limit on number of hours worked (I'm unaware of any in my state)

It was Ontario, Canada. It was either > 40 or 44 hours that counted as overtime, I can't remember if there was anything about the number of days.

In the US, where this company is located, software engineers are exempt from overtime rules.

The exception is supposed to be for workers that control their hours and managers who control others. Software engineers are explicit exception. The manager exception was cresting problems for low-salary managers so they added salary limit which are talking about increasing.

We were "exempt" too in the sense that we didn't get paid o/t, but could also (at least by law) refuse to work more than a legislated maximum, either 40 or 44 I believe.

at will, exempt employee. no overtime. There is generally no cap on the number of hours an employee can legally work in a day. Employer can ask for just about any hours, and you can quit if you don't like it.

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