Re: Exempt status for Tech Writers

[Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>]

Deborah Hemstreet wrote:

> I personally think that the whole issue of "Professional" needs to be 
> carefully examined and defined. In my opinion, a degree and job title, 
> or even the US Government, do not make a person a professional 
> practitioner of their career... but I digress.

I agree, and nicely said.

I need to make a *slight* tweak to the notion I earlier suggested about 
"professional" being the distinction made between hourly and salaried. 
Sorry for bodging that when summing up the overtime issue yesterday.

The legal criteria for determining who was exempt from overtime pay was 
in part "duties" based (which is more about professional levels of 
knowledge and work-related duties), but the test could also fall back on 
the hourly pay rate of a high tech employee.

At that time (early mid-1990s), the US Department of Labor (DOL) set the 
upper limit at 6.5 times the national minimum wage, which yielded just 
over $USD27/hr. If you made more per hour, as everyone in software 
engineering disciplines did, then you were not entitled to overtime pay 
rates (1.5 times your normal hourly rate), and that was the intent, to 
curb the bleeding of cash from employers to their hourly contract 
software engineers working 80+ hours week and billing all but the first 
40 hours at time and a half.

And now, a moment of silence please, as we remember the dotcom era and 
its spontaneous generation of 20-something software millionaires stuck 
in commuter traffic in their Lamborghinis.

Somehow, probably through the agency of linguistically lazy people with 
too many extra zeros on their pay packet totals, this $27/hr started 
representing the divide where professionals made more, non-professionals 
less.

Historical, and a little hysterical,

Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com
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