Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton 60 Minutes Interview

We have OT, but it is a pain to get it approved to the point that if you do the process you waste so much time you have to add another hour. It probably costs more to approve the OT than the OT itself.

 

The worst job I've ever had I accepted after receiving a written offer that detailed my base salary and what they thought I would make with overtime (straight time). I wish I could remember the numbers on the page, but I want to say there was about a 20-25% difference in the two numbers. I never made as little as that projection, and like I mentioned, folks at my level (lower level specialist/engineer/tech type) was filled with folks who bragged about working overtime. Department managers (pretty big title in this flat organization), would even get in on shaming folks who didn't work long hours. We had one really lean year, and that was the only time that overtime hours were ever mentioned. I regularly worked 60-70 hr weeks just to stay reasonably behind, and 80 hour weeks were common. The "why" I took this job is a really long story, but the moral of it is I was young, naive, and determined I was getting what I wanted.

 

I can get it, but I've never tried here. Our boss gives us the option of flexing it off the books, and I take it.

 

You work for a government agency?

I am only asking because my brother was a PhD at USDA Research facility. He just retired. He said their OT process was onerous.

In my day, in the corporate world exempt (salaried) OT pay was very rare. You had to have someone needed for 25% (10 hr/week) OT for minimum of 2 consecutive weeks. Manager had to justify and submit. Usually a highly critical time sensitive project. And it was only straight time pay. 1st line manager approved and submitted request for payroll to include. We delegated alot of things to our line managers. Just keep upstream aware.

Most of the time my team members with wife preferred if I just gave them a couple of days off. Which I could do and not ask for approval. The single guys liked the money (hookers and blow ... just sayin').

 

I’ve never had a salary. What does hourly and OT mean?

 

And that is how you do it.

And, this may be sacrilege, but I do not consider it me owing the company 40 hours of work, but rather the work they hired me to do. If I can do it in 20, good on me. Do not give me busy work or make me hang around just because I got done quickly.

 

Assuming you're serious, this is close to being right:

Hourly (non-exempt) - You're paid a wage based on the hours you work. Work less, get paid less without using paid time off. Usually paid at 1.5× your regular rate for over 40 hours and sometimes higher 2×, 3×, etc depending on policy, where you live, union contracts and when that overtime comes.

Exempt with overtime - You're (supposed to be) paid for 40 hours a week regardless, and you can get more if you work beyond that depending on the same things as above, but often it is simply a straight time wage for anything over 40 depending on policy.

Salary - Same as above, but usually no overtime. You're paid for 40 hours whether you work 20, 40, 50, 60, 80, etc.

There's lots of variation in this out there based on employers. The DOL has information on exempt vs non-exempt. An easy way to think of it is exempt from getting overtime vs not exempt from getting overtime, but there's more to it than that.

 

Yep. It is good you had the talk with the kids.

When we hired hourly. We only gave them the 40 hour salary. We were instructed to tell them that OT was the exception not the norm. At the time, our pay was always competitive and our benefits were top tier (full defined pension; TDSP w/6% match; solid vacation/holiday plan; great family medical/dental/eye/mental health; no sick leave ... when you are sick you are sick and you get paid ... never had an issue and if there was abuse the managers handled). Basically we sold hires on total compensation package. Of course that all changed when short term EPS became the rage.

 

Good summary. OT = over time.

Some companies (I know mine did) got in trouble for trying to change hourly (non-exempt) job descriptions to salaried (exempt) job descriptions to avoid paying overtime. I forget the outcome. I was retiring and did not follow.

 

To paint me as even dumber, I worked as an intern for a sister company to the one described above. I wound up going through one of the production department's orientations to prepare me for a project I had there. The guy doing the orientation spent a long time explaining to the new hires there with me that they should never count on their overtime and telling stories of people who went into debt expecting the overtime money to always be there and having to scrape to get by without it. Our company was basically a new facility cut from the same cloth. It wasn't overtime that got folks in the facility where I worked. It was simply that they paid so much better for production work than all but a handful of surrounding employers. Folks got in, grew to hate it, but they couldn't afford to leave.

Folks like me came and left like it had a revolving door. The only reason I stuck around as long as I did was because I just didn't have enough experience in my field to make a hasty exit to anything else worthwhile. It got so bad that they gave the technical engineering types time and a half overtime instead of straight time in order to keep from being a feeder for competitors. It was easily the biggest raise I have ever gotten. When I left, no one in our group of six was there when I got there or had been there for more than two years except my boss and me. They took to hiring straight out of a local commuter college instead of seasoned professionals for our organization as I was leaving. That didn't help all that much.

 

This is one of the reasons why corporate folks are freaking out over work-at-home vs in-office. They are hiring for 40 hrs, but have no clue if the work they assign you takes 40 hrs.

A good manager will know that you can do that "work" in ~20hrs rather than 40hrs and will capitalize on your skills and give you a second equally challenging ~20 hr job. Knowing that you can do both in 40 hrs.

But alot of these guys are not good managers.

 

* Jira has entered the conversation.

And now you will log all tickets and the tasks that used to take 2 hours will now take 4 hours.

Why have you gotten less productive? It must be work from home!

 

That sounds like people running that outfit were clueless.

When I started with the company I worked for, they believed that the employee was a companies' greatest asset. They wanted to hire the best and keep them for the duration of their career. They wanted managers to identify a persons strengths, encourage it, maximize it and not have them doing busy work to fill the 40 hours. If that meant letting a top employee transfer to a group where their skills were put to better use,, that was a good thing. They believed in the importance of intellectual capital.

As I said, that all changed. Leaders started putting more emphasis on EPS and reducing expense became the easiest lever to pull. Employees became a commodity, an expense, hence layoff/offshore. I am glad that occurred later in my career.

 

It's a highly successful company with major brand recognition and lots of respect in their industry. They're just really good at building and maintaining their culture. From their cctv feed in the break rooms and lunch rooms:

Respect for the individual is not about how each individual is treated but about how each associate is dedicated to their work each day and their fellow associates.​

This was referring to one of the eight pillars of their philosophy or something like it which was, "Respect for the individual." This campaign started when morale fell sharply a couple of years in. This wasn't the only one, but it's the one I remember the most. Those of us who had been there the longest and had the training class on their philosophy were like, that's not exactly how it was explained to us.

 

I came in around 120% for the better part of 6 years in my old job. Don’t miss it.

 

I always chuckled at some of these project "management/tracking/development tools" that were supposed to improve a team's productivity. Don't get me wrong, they have their place. I just found understanding what your team can do and being able to articulate and provide pretty graphs for the big guys was always better and more productive than making them use a tool to make my job "easier", make HR/Legal "feel better".

 

Microsoft has overtaken Apple as the largest US company in terms of market value boosted by their AI.

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/11/microsoft-overtakes-apple-largest-us-company

 

I've been wearing these a lot, lately.

https://duckcamp.com/products/original-bamboo-hoodie-heathered-belize-blue

 

It sounds like you and I may have worked for the same company (or affliate) and I'm sorry if you are/were there when things were spiraling down.

If it is the same (and I would respectfully ask that no one try to call it out or dox us)
when I started and for the majority of my career there were only 3 basic beliefs. I have the original book explaining those concepts. It was an excellent company for me during my career. And I am extremely fortunate that us old farts were able to fight and retain our pension. God bless the interwebz in those days. IMO, things began to change in the company I worked for around mid/late 90's and not for the better (I suppose that is my subjective POV). And at some point, I forget when, they decided to expand the 3 to 8 (?), I believe. I can understand why it would be different from your first time.

I wish you much success.

 

I don't think it is, but I am willing to bet there are some similarities. One of the better things this company actually did was introduce a pension plan a couple of years before I left with vesting being retroactive meaning I actually have a small pension (think a case of light beer a month) available when I get to retirement age assuming it's still there in fifteen years or maybe less. I've forgotten how it worked. I think it was another effort to keep professional types from leaving so quickly. I couldn't say how effective it was for them overall, but I'm doubtful it was any kind of silver bullet.