Is it “soft fraud” when a manager at an investment bank regularly demands unreasonable productivity from their junior analysts, causing them to work late and effectively reduce their compensation rate? Only if the word “abuse” isn’t ambiguous and loaded enough for you!
Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.
I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?
> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.
I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.
I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.
Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.
> people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
That doesn't sound like actually working late?
(I still agree with you, though, that this isn't the equivalent of stealing a laptop, even if you do it enough to take home $2,000 worth of dinner.)
That's true, but the point I made to that was more along the lines of "physically being present in the office, it's likely an employee will still provide enough benefit to make the money worth it". They don't have to be coding. Chatting with a coworker about something non-work-related can be enough of a bonding experience for that to.be worth the company the dinner money in intangible productivity benefits down the line.
Is this meant to be a gotcha question? Yes, unpaid overtime is fraud, and employers commit that kind of fraud probably just as regularly as employees doing the things up thread.
gp was talking about salaried employees which is legally exempt from overtime pay. There is no rigid 40-hour ceiling for salary pay.
Salary compensation is typical for white-collar employees such as analysts in investment banking and private equity, associates at law firms, developers at tech startups, etc.
Overtime can't be assumed by definition. If it's an expectation, it should be written into the contracted working hours, and then it's not overtime. (Or if there are no contracted working hours, then overtime could only be defined in relation to legally required maximum working hours, in which case it can't be an expectation for employees to exceed these without appropriate compensation.)
Sure, but in that case they are not working 'overtime', they are just working in the absence of any effective regulations governing reasonable working hours.
