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>>Sam;
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>>As an exempt employee I have worked 140 hour weeks for months with no overtime pay, and no stock options. What is wrong with you guys? 40 hour week? What do you do with all that extra time? God, a person could have a life, raise a family and perhaps go to church on Sunday. Something must be wrong somewhere!Do you thing it is where I was working or your place of employment that is "wrong"? :)
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>>Technology is a great god and some places of employment can relate to this. Just ask them who god is! :)
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>>Tom
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>20 hour work day, 7 days a week for several months??? That's not work, that's slavery!

I never know how to address you. How do you like to be addressed?


I was working for a small company that had one product. My job was to create a new version of that product. It was an environmental chamber, used to test electronics parts, boards and final products. The ability to control temperature to plus or minus .1 C and humidity to 2 % was elemental to the project. We had a dead line and I worked alone to design the electronics (I was an electronics engineer) , design, cut, bend the stainless steel and wrote the software to burn the EPROM’s which controlled the microprocessor and I/O. I completed the prototype eight hours before the show began.

We went to the Semicon Show in San Mateo, California and had the most advanced chamber of its type. The owners received millions of dollars in orders from the floor of the show. It was a great success. The owners hired a consultant to evaluate my work after the show was over. We had a meeting between the consultant and the owners of the company (husband and wife). I had worked 20 hours a day seven days a week for three months and had no time for my wife, son or daughter. The consultant said, “Tom, I cannot believe you did this in less that one year! An outstanding job”! Finally, the owners said “thank you” for all my effort. I had burned myself out helping the owners. A few minutes later the owners came to me and said, “Tom, you have done such a good job we want you to be “Production Engineer” for this new product. They left my office and I called a friend who is VP of a company and told him what was going on. He offered me a job and an hour later I turned in my letter of resignation with two weeks notice to the owners.

When I saw the video clips of .COM’ers working 16 hour days and 7 day weeks about two years ago, it brought back nightmares. These guys and dolls were sleeping on the floor and putting in long hours for the promise (greed) of becoming millionaires. My experience occurred in 1990. Whenever someone says “Exempt Employee” or overtime, I get sick! Also, the sight of stainless steel makes me recall that event.

There was a book on the market "How to Make All Your Employees Exempt". By law you do not have to pay Exempt Employees overtime. There is no limit to how many hours you can work an employee in this case.


When I was in the Air Force I had to stay up for 72 hours at a time on several occasions (3) with no food or sleep. That was a life and death situation though and had nothing to do with “hi tech”.

It reminds me of the Irish song about the “Hiring Fair”. You are promised a great job and it turns out to be a job, which is killing you. You complain to the owner, who says, “If you die that is alright as there are plenty more where you came from”! Such is the life of man!

We have lots of "Hiring Fairs" in Silicon Valley. Care to join us? :)

Tom