You cannot go wrong with either, I have been very happy with my system76 laptop, One company is open source hardware the other is open source software. I wish both could cooperate and do some great work.
Employee misclassification is very common, even and especially with higher-paid salaried positions. Whether you are exempt depends on the actual work you do in the day, and in what proportions. It does not depend on your job title, official job description, salary/hourly status, or pay level.
Example: You work 60 hours a week for BigCo. You have a fancy Director of BlahBlah title. You receive a salary of $500k. You spend 49 percent of your time performing truly managerial tasks. The other 51 percent of your time, you’re pitching in to help with your subordinates’ production-level work. Guess what? You’re non-exempt 100% of the time, and your employer owes you 20 hours of overtime each week, at an approximate rate of $240 per hour. This isn’t a kooky law school hypothetical, by the way: actual employees have sued and won on similar facts.
Edit: the downvotes would seem to mean my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer, of course!
A good indicator is "do you have to fill out a timesheet". If you do, that means you're probably paid an hourly wage, and you should be paid overtime; if you don't, you're probably salaried and overtime-exempt. As usual, it's more complicated than that if you get into the weeds (e.g. in the news article linked in the comment you're replying to), and having a lawyer interpret your employment contract is probably the most authoritative way to figure that out if you feel your situation is unusual.
You can be hourly and exempt. You can be paid a fixed salary and be non-exempt. There are also many salaried people who fill out timecards.
Edit to your edit:
> my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer
Just to be clear -- frequently incorrect even among HN readers? I would think one or more of these exemptions apply to just about everyone likely to read these comments who has a job, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
Ah, I think I get what you were saying, company A is billing company B hourly so employee of company A needs to track their time even if overtime-exempt. Yeah, not necessarily "rare" in tech, mea culpa.
> Overtime for a salary non-exempt worker is poorly defined.
No it's 1.5x (minimum), just like hourly.
To find the hourly wage that the 1.5x applies to, you divide their salary for the pay period by the number of non-overtime paid hours in the pay period.
> An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt.
Under federal law, but maybe not under state law (CA, for instance, has a much higher threshold for computer software workers.)
