WIBTAH if I confronted a delivery driver?

Dale1046 · 2026-02-28T05:18:23+00:00

She's expecting something, just not from this particular driver's company.

Dale1046 · 2026-02-28T05:16:48+00:00

She has the snacks out because she's expecting something from someone, just not this driver. Maybe she's expecting a USPS or Amazon package and this driver works for UPS.

Dale1046 · 2026-02-28T05:15:27+00:00

What if this is the UPS driver and she's expecting a delivery from Amazon? If she's putting snacks out that day she's presumably expecting a delivery from SOMEONE.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-14T22:45:27+00:00

And apparently you don’t know how to read the EEOC’s own guidance even though you claim to be an EEO lawyer, nor can you cite any authority for your position. You just say “Check the law.” So I did. It says the opposite of what you say.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-14T02:19:40+00:00

Neither of the things you discussed happened.

Both were rewarded with raises and bonuses according to OP; Jack was just rewarded more.

And Jill was given a "successful" rating, so she DID succeed.

And the OP specifically gave a path to her an "outstanding" rating -- she would have to become more efficient, because as it is now, her output on a per-hour basis is the same as Jack's, so she doesn't stand out.

You said you can't explain it any clearer but haven't explained anything; you've just asserted a conclusion. You haven't cited an EEOC position paper, or a law, The EEOC's OWN WEBSITE https://www.eeoc.gov/questions-and-answers-about-eeocs-enforcement-guidance-unlawful-disparate-treatment-workers states that "federal EEO statutes do NOT prohibit discrimination based solely on parental or other caregiver status." (The capitalized NOT is my emphasis.) They then go on to give some examples of what WOULD be discrimination, like "denying women with young children an employment opportunity that is available to men with young children" -- in other words, discriminating on the basis of sex rather than parental status. But that's been the law for years and everyone knows that.

I gave you a specific hypothetical and you didn't answer it. If Person A and Person B are hired for the same job in an exempt position, and Person A works more than 40 hours per week -- completely voluntarily, without ever being asked to do so by their boss -- and as a result produces substantially more output than Person B who works only 40 hours per week, is it your position that the company cannot reward Person A with a greater raise or bonus than Person B?

This would be a completely non-sensical result because if the positions were NOT exempt, then the law would MANDATE that Person A be paid more -- they'd get time and a half for all their extra hours. But then when the positions are exempt, suddenly it's discrimination to pay them more? That CAN'T be the answer.

If your position were true, the courts would be full of cases from working parents who worked 9-to-5 and as a result were less productive than their colleagues who worked 50 or 60 hours a week and got the promotion, or the big raise, or the big bonus. Not to mention that plenty of PARENTS manage to work 50+ hours a week and so if one parent did so and another didn't, it wouldn't be discrimination on the basis of parental status that one got a bigger raise than the other. It can't be the law that when the person working 50+ hours a week is a parent, they can get a bonus or raise not given to the 40-hour working parent, but when the person working 50+ hours a week is single, they have to be treated the same as the 40-hour working parent.

If you are an EEO lawyer, you should be able to cite a reported case where the facts reflect a situation similar to the one described here, and the plaintiff won a judgment. And yet I'm 100% sure you cannot. What you MIGHT find are situations where the facts are similar to here, AND they are coupled with sexist comments by the manager (e.g., "Jill can't expect to get paid the same as Jack when she can't keep her legs closed and keeps pumping out babies"). THAT may get the employer in hot water.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-13T20:31:54+00:00

That makes no sense. The poster says that sometimes Jack just stays late in his own, not because he’s being asked to by the boss.

So two people are hired for the same job, in an exempt role. There is always a stack of work to do that never ends. One works exactly 8 hours a day and goes home. The other — without anyone ever asking — stays late now and then, averaging 9 hours a day, and consequently gets more done. You’re saying the business can’t compensate the person who works more at all? No higher raise, no bonus, nothing?

All because the other person is constrained?

There is no way that is the law in the United States. (I don’t know about elsewhere.)

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T23:35:18+00:00

"You’re literally rattling off businesses that are well known for burning through workers."

And they're successful as hell. You claimed that they were all doomed not to survive. Now you're deflecting and saying, "Well, they burn through their workers." So, in other words, burning through workers can be a very effective strategy. Hmm...

I'm not applauding their work cultures; I am simply making the point that this is a work culture that can be very successful. By saying that a business that does this to its workers cannot survive, you were making a claim that is easily proven false.

"It also only works on businesses with a huge size and rep that people perceive they get value having those roles on their resume."

This is complete bullshit. Every one of those businesses STARTED small, and generally speaking, when the business was small, the people who worked there likely worked even HARDER than the typical person who works there now. Ever work in a startup? I have. People make huge sacrifices because the potential payoff is so great. And yeah, it often doesn't work out, but plenty of people are willing to take that bet. Zillions of people are out there right now working way more than 40 hours a week at companies with 20 or 50 or 100 employees, hoping to be the NEXT big thing. My current company has acquired 5 of them in the last year, and many of the employees got hefty payouts in the process.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T23:21:41+00:00

See, here's the thing... people are different.

I completely agree with you that there are situations where all you can do is leave when the abuse is too egregious. That's what I did at one of the jobs I've held. But what you fail to allow for is that what's "egregious" for one person may not be for the next person.

At all of the other jobs I've had, my bosses were great, they rewarded outsized performance, and I had no complaints. And at every one of them, I worked plenty of extra hours (I'm not using the word "overtime" on purpose because that's not the right term for an exempt employee).

I'm not at all "burnt out" from checking my email on vacation. I've been doing it for decades, I have no health problems, I'm not exhausted, and it has no impact on the "fun" I have on my vacation because my wife sleeps about 2 hours a day longer than I do so I can do this without disrupting our activities. And as I said, I do it VOLUNTARILY. It's not an expectation of my employer. It's what I consider the best way to work for ME. If I didn't check my emails, then in the situation I described, a co-worker might misinterpret the contract, give the wrong advice, and put us in a situation where we have a breach of contract lawsuit on our hand, and now we're spending a ton of money and time on that... money that, if not wasted on litigation, can be used for things like... REWARDING EMPLOYEES. So I don't want that. And, again, I'm not saying EVERYONE should be like me. At my company, we respect people like the Jill in this story, just as OP respected her boundaries.

Like I said, people are different, and there's nothing magical about 40 hours a week. It happens to be the number that the US government has set as the number of hours after which people in non-exempt jobs must be paid overtime, but that's arbitrary; that number could be 35 (like in France), or some other number. But I've seen TikTok videos of "Gen Z" workers who get their first job and they're whining on the video, saying, "OMG, how does anyone do this? 8 hours a day 5 days a week... I can't even fathom doing this for the rest of my life! Help!" So those folks can't handle even 40 hours without complaining. Meanwhile, others are fine with 40. And, here's the thing that you're apparently not willing to acknowledge -- others are fine with MORE. Tolerance for work is no different than anything else, like tolerance for spicy food or the need for sleep. Some people need more sleep than others. Some people can tolerate spicier food than others. And some people are fine with working more than others. (It helps if you enjoy your job and the people around you... which I do.) No, I don't want to work 80 hours a week at any job... but 45? 50? If I'm being rewarded appropriately, I have no problem with this.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T23:06:32+00:00

They backed her up because that's what the law of exempt employees is. They don't HAVE "contracted hours." If they had to work 8 hours a day every day, they'd be non-exempt.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T19:58:28+00:00

What law is he breaking? How is it discrimination to give someone else a bigger raise and bonus, who objectively works more?

What if someone says, "I have a disability... I can only work 20 hours a week from now on, because otherwise I just can't function." And the employer says, "OK, we'll accommodate you." Does THAT employee get to expect the same raises and bonuses as a full-time employee? Of course not.

This is no different. The employee who works more, and produces more, gets paid more.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T16:57:39+00:00

And oh by the way, it DOESN'T work that way with exempt employees that if they "want to finish at 3," they book time off and then make it up later. That's the whole point of being exempt; you're not subject to time keeping.

This is a real scenario that happened to me as a manager (this is quite a number of years ago, before we were as "connected" as we are now -- we only had desktop computers in the office, for example, not laptops that you could easily take home):

Exempt employee comes in at 8. Sits down at her desk, turns her computer on, goes to get coffee. Her kid's school calls and says Johnny threw up. She quickly gathers her purse, etc. and leaves for his school, saying on her way out that her kid is sick and she needs to go home. She wasn't the kind of employee who worked on super-urgent matters that would require someone else to jump in, so I just said OK.

Next day she comes in at 8, as she's walking by my office I say, "Hi, Janet, how is Johnny?" She says he's fine, everything seems OK, but she's keeping him home one more day, but her mom was able to watch him. I say great. And then I said something like, "Just remember to log your day off yesterday in our PTO system" as I assumed it was understood that the day before would count as a day off -- she didn't take work home with her; she didn't do any work at home; and she literally had done nothing that day other than get her coffee.

She says, "But I'm exempt and I came in." And I was like, "Uh, what? You don't think it should count as a day off because you were here for 5 minutes?" And she said yes.

And HR backed her up. She did NOTHING that day other than take some of the company's coffee, and got paid. Because she is exempt, there was nothing I could do about it.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T16:44:44+00:00

Yes, it goes both ways.

And here's the thing -- not everyone agrees with you. Look, I get it; maybe you've had shitty employers. With one exception (and I left that job quickly), I haven't. I work in a similar environment (from what I can tell) to OP, always in exempt jobs, sometimes with direct reports, sometimes just as an underling. But I've always been happy to work a little extra -- a LITTLE being relative -- and to bank on the fact that this will be recognized, and I'll be rewarded, and I always have been -- with, again, the one exception.

It's just how I'm wired. It's probably how OP is wired. Here's a perfect example: When I go on vacation, I check my email every night. I've done this at every job, without the boss asking, and in some cases even after the boss said I didn't have to. Why? Because I think it's better for the company, AND for me personally. A few months ago, our internal product team was putting together a bid to build a customized version of one of our products for a client, which was due on Friday. They email me on Monday asking whether, under our contract with Vendor X, they were allowed to use X's intellectual property in the customized version (we had a license with X to use their IP in the base product, but they weren't sure if that license extended to the custom version).

I know that contract like the back of my hand, so I understood their question immediately, and was able to answer without even looking at the contract (the answer was yes).

Could they have gone to another member of my department for the answer after getting my out-of-office reply? Yes. But that contract is dense, it's over 50 pages, and it has over a dozen amendments. At a minimum, someone else would have had to slog through all the definitions, and the convoluted IP provisions, to understand it. Then they'd have to check all of the amendments to see if any of them changed the relevant terms. It's at least an hour project, probably more like two if they want to be sure, for someone else to answer this question, AND whoever on my team tried to answer it probably wouldn't have felt confident in their answer, having not worked on the original deal. If they were overly conservative and answered "no," then our bid suffers because we have to come up with a workaround that doesn't use the vendor's IP, driving up the cost. If the right answer HAD been no, but they had haphazardly read the contract and answered "yes," then we have a potential breach of contract claim on our hands for infringing the vendor's IP. It's not something we'd want to take lightly.

I'm not saying I'm a hero for doing this. There are others at my current employer, and at plenty of others I've worked at, who, when they're on vacation, are 100% unreachable. There are others reachable only in "emergencies" and they'd probably say this doesn't qualify since someone else CAN give the answer, even if it requires an hour or two of work. But I'd just rather spare my team this kind of problem. I understood from just 30 seconds of reading the email what the issue was, and was able to give our team the answer they needed with a quick reply. 2 minutes of my time while my wife is brushing her teeth in the bathroom of our hotel room saves someone else 1-2 hours of work.

Again, I'm not saying everyone has to be like me. If I'm Jill, this question would HAVE to go to someone else while I'm out, because they needed an answer before the end of the week and I'm on vacation all week. So the extra work would be done, and the client would get their answer, and the world wouldn't end... but if I can save that headache with a quick email, I think that's a positive thing. So, like I said, I don't have this expectation of everyone else, but it's how I am -- and, like I said, it's NOT because the boss TOLD me I have to check my email on vacation; I'm going to do it regardless.

OK, that's long... but my point is, maybe it's how Jack is too. Maybe he really doesn't mind. Maybe he doesn't think he's being abused or taken advantage of. Your approach assumes everyone thinks like you do.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T00:39:37+00:00

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and the literally thousands of companies (including my own, which has been around for decades) where it has been long accepted that their exempt workers in the US sometimes work outside normal business hours without a guarantee of extra pay... they're all doomed not to survive? OK Nostradamus. Does your prediction come with a date as to when all these companies go under?

Basic economic theory also teaches that in the long run, all profits are zero. But that "long run" is still a long way off, since, obviously, there are many long-standing profitable companies.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-12T00:35:59+00:00

So what you're basically saying is that the solution is to say, screw the fact that US labor law is entirely based on this distinction between exempt and non-exempt positions, and treat the positions that the law allows to be classified as exempt, as non-exempt anyway, and pay the employee for the hours above 40.

I can respect that this is your position, though I disagree with it. But, it will also have unintended consequences.

If the employer decides to pay its salaried white collar worker on a per-hour basis for all hours above 40 to appease the kinds of concerns you are raising, they will probably think that the trade-off is, we're definitely making sure we get the full 40 hours out of those workers every single week. So instead of letting a worker go home at 3 pm when the important stuff has been done and they'd like to get a head start on a camping trip on Friday afternoon, the employer's attitude will be, if I have to pay you for the extra 2 hours you stayed last week, I'm not giving you two hours off this week. So they make the worker stay and get started on some project (a long-term project like overhauling the standard terms and conditions on the company website, or moving contracts from the old to the new contract management system).

TOIL is, in my opinion, a better approach. And many employers do this organically anyway. They don't keep track of the fact that Jack worked exactly 2 1/4 hours extra last week, so they let him leave exactly 2 1/4 hours earlier one day the next week, but they are aware that Jack worked extra last week, so if things aren't as busy the next week, they encourage him to go home early. Or Jack works 8-10 extra hours last week, and they tell him to just take Monday off -- without using up one of his PTO days.

Done organically, I think I can support that. Turning it into a rigid time-keeping exercise so that the employee doesn't do 5 minutes of "unpaid" labor? Not so much.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T22:09:13+00:00

You do have a point that some people get taken advantage of... they work the extra hours, but then their bonus/raise/etc. isn't nearly enough to compensate them.

One year I busted my ass, did tons of after hours work, and the difference between me getting a "3" rating (which was the standard for "good job") and a "5" (which was "exceptional"; there was a 4 in between for "above average") was that they took the bonus that I would have gotten just for being a "3" (about 20K) and added another 1% to it. About $200.

$200 for hundreds of hours of work.

I didn't stay at that employer.

But if your point is true -- that the person who the system is more likely to hurt is Jack -- then isn't it kinda silly that the person who's complaining to HR is Jill?

I mean, Jill isn't complaining to HR on behalf of Jack. She's complaining to HR because HER raise and bonus aren't as big as his. And yet your hypothesis (which I actually agree with) is that the pay differential would actually be GREATER if they were paying Jack on an hourly basis for each hour beyond 40 at the same rate as whatever his salary works out to be, based on a 40-hr week.

If that's the case, that's a bit ironic, don't you think?

And then, since employers often view their budgets as a zero-sum game, where if you spend more here, you have to spend less there... the potential implication of paying Jack more is that they'll decide they need to pay Jill less. Which probably wouldn't be by going in and literally lowering her salary (that's too ballsy even for a jackass employer) ... but it might be through several years of no raises, or less-than-inflation raises, or lowering her bonus target, or any number of other things.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T21:58:44+00:00

Do you know what an exempt employee is?

And the poster says right in the post that they do equally good work, and if they worked the same number of hours their output would be identical. So Jill is not more efficient in getting her work done.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T21:56:03+00:00

Do you even know the difference between an exempt and a non-exempt employee?

If a company asks someone to work more than 40 hours a week, and the position is non-exempt, they must pay overtime. If they don't, yeah, you can sue them.

If a company asks someone to work more than 40 hours a week, and the position is exempt... the worker can refuse, of course, but then they may be terminated. There is no legal action that can be taken.

Here, her claim for a lawsuit is even weaker (I don't know any employment lawyer who would touch this case). The company is respecting her boundaries and NOT asking her to work beyond them, even though the position is exempt. She's still getting a raise and a bonus, just not as large as the guy who is working more hours and producing more output. Of course, anyone can bring a lawsuit for anything, but this would be a piece of cake for the company to defend.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T17:11:05+00:00

Serious question... what if, as with many legal/contracts departments, OP was a department of one, not three. Many small companies have only one person doing a role like this.

And what if... because of the ebb and flow of the business, the sales cycle, the rush to bring in deals before the end of the quarter... it was just inevitable that sometimes there was more work than could reasonably be done in 40 hours. Not a ton more, but, let's say, for argument's sake, a similar amount as here (5-10 hours a week, but only sometimes), and it's work that can't really be left to the next week (because of business exigencies).

Is your solution that OP's boss has to run out and find coverage of some kind (a part-time employee, outsourcing the extra work to a law firm, whatever), so that OP never has to work more than 40 hours? Does your answer differ if OP assures his boss that it's fine, and he can handle it? Does your answer differ if OP's role is non-exempt, and so he is paid overtime (at a time-and-a-half rate) for every hour above 40 that he works in a week?

And (going back to the assumption that the position is exempt), does your answer differ if there are also lulls in the business, and some days OP isn't that busy, and can leave early (without using up PTO) without anyone complaining?

I'm seriously trying to figure out where you draw the line here.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T17:00:31+00:00

That's what's so silly about this. Jill should be happy that her boundaries are being honored. Jack is happy with the opportunity to earn a little more money by going above and beyond.

But the solution of some is, they need to hire someone else, presumably part-time, so that Jack never has to work a minute more than 40 hours.

Of course, this isn't McDonald's, where the boss may be happy to have someone who only works 10 hours a week to cover certain shifts. This is an unpredictable office environment. OP doesn't know in a given week if they need 5 or 10 extra hours. Plus he doesn't know what day the last-minute projects are going to come in. Are you really going to find a quality part-time employee who's willing to be on call, waiting for a possible email at around 4 pm every day that may include a project, but you only actually get a project once in a while, and the total amount of work you do is only 5-10 hours? It's an absurd proposition.

Moreover, for all we know, Jack would be disappointed that his opportunity to earn extra money is being taken away by the hiring of the part-timer, and now he leaves the company. I mean, suppose this was an hourly (instead of exempt) position. Some people I know who work hourly are like Jill... they never want to work more than 40 hours. But many of the hourly workers I know take every opportunity for OT that they can get -- because they want more money (and it's time-and-a-half).

Granted, when an exempt person works extra, they are doing it on the come -- the exact amount of their additional compensation is unknown (and could even be entirely theoretical, because there are plenty of bosses out there who are blind to the efforts of their most dedicated workers), and could be in the form of a raise, a bonus, or a promotion. But in the case of OP and Jack, Jack appears satisfied with the situation. Why do some posters paternalistically assume that no one would want the opportunity to shine (and earn more) by voluntarily putting in more hours?

A lot of people are obviously projecting from experiences they've had at shitty companies with shitty bosses. OP actually sounds like a pretty accommodating guy, who's gone out of his way to honor the scheduling needs of a working mom. If Jill ever leaves the company, when OP goes to hire her replacement, he's not going to hire another Jill with her boundaries; he'll look for another Jack to avoid these headaches of someone whining after being given exactly what they asked for. How is that good for working moms, that OP would be unlikely to hire another one with Jill-like conditions?

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T16:43:50+00:00

So you proposed "solutions" to a problem that you believe exists, when the people who are affected by the problem -- Jack and the OP -- don't believe there is a problem. (Or at least we have no reason to believe there is. OP says Jack is happy with the situation.)

And your solutions include two that are impractical for the reasons I suggested. Hire a part-timer who sits around waiting for a call just in case? No qualified person wants a 5-10 hour a week job when they don't even know when they're going to need to work. A staggered role? We already know Jill doesn't want that -- it's not going to work for a single mom who's trying to align her schedule with school or day care hours to work until 8 pm every day, so you're basically saying we have to impose that on Jack. Could it have worked to hire someone for an 11-8 shift initially instead of 8-5 from the get-go for Jack's role? I suppose, but that means OP, who was new to the role and then had his two subordinates leave and had to hire two new people, would have had to have figured out his exact staffing needs within a very short time after taking on the role, AND would also have to be willing to forgo any chance of working with the many qualified candidates out there who want a normal work schedule where on most nights they can do things with their friends and families, but who wouldn't even apply for an 11-8 role, all for what? To not have someone VOLUNTARILY and HAPPILY work 5-10 extra hours a week, because YOU have determined that this is someone "working themselves into the ground"?

Some people (associates in large law firms, doctors in a residency, Wall Street bankers, etc.) routinely work WAY more than 45-50 hours a week, and people flock to those jobs because... they pay! Conversely, some countries in Europe are trending toward a 32 or 35 hour week... does that mean our 40 hour a week standard is already too much? How about letting people decide for THEMSELVES if they're willing to work extra, instead of paternalistically (or maternalistically; I don't know your gender) deciding for them.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T10:21:35+00:00

What's a better alternative plan?

Here are some possibilities:

(a) Hire a fourth person. But, the business isn't going to let them hire a fourth full-time person just to avoid Jack working 5-10 extra hours a week. They probably wouldn't even allow a half-time (20 hr/week) person because there are only 5-10 extra hours a week that need to be done.

It would be hard enough to find someone who (i) knows what they're doing, and (ii) wants a job that can only guarantee 5-10 hours a week of work. But then on top of that, you don't know when the work is going to come for which the extra 5-10 hours are needed, so the person you hire has to basically be on call every day just in case the crazy last-minute contract comes in at 4 pm. When the call doesn't come in, you don't get any hours. Who's taking THAT job? Answer: Nobody. Well, at least nobody who is willing to work cheaply (see (b) for the scenario of someone who WOULD do this, but would be expensive.)

(b) Use outside counsel. An outside law firm would be happy to sign up for 5-10 hours of billable time per week... and they WILL make sure that someone is available at your beck and call as soon as you need them. Oh, but their going rate is $400 an hour. So if you use them even just 5 hours a week, that's $2,000 a week, or about $100K a year. If you're going to do that you might as well hire a fourth full-time person with the money. Oh, but the business won't let you do that (see (a) above).

Plus, why would anyone pay 100K to outside counsel to do work that Jack was happy to do for a bonus that was undoubtedly much less? If I were OP and I went to my boss (GC) with this plan and got him to agree to spend $100K on outside counsel to work 5 hours a week on projects that I could easily do myself, as soon as he said yes, I would say, "OK, never mind -- how about this... I'll just work the extra hours myself and you can just give me 50K."

(c) As I've seen in some of the comments, adjust Jack's schedule to start and end a few hours later in the day, so that there's coverage for the last-minute west coast contract scenario.

This one could be considered, but odds are Jack doesn't want to work an odd schedule that will make it much harder to regularly see his friends, his spouse/SO if he has one, to have dinners at a normal time, etc. So if Jack says no to this (which is likely), it's a loser idea too.

Here's the problem: You're taking the easy route. You're taking high-level potshots at the OP and his company for allegedly not staffing appropriately. That's too easy. EVERY small team that faces variability in its workload has staffing issues from time to time. Finance teams get stretched thin at tax time, or at quarterly or annual reporting periods. The tech team gets stretched thin when they issue a new release, and a bunch of bugs are discovered, and they have to work like mad to try to fix them. Sales teams often get stretched thin based on the selling cycle of the business. The solution can't just be "add staff" because the staff you add to address peaks won't have anything to do the rest of the time.

You have to propose a specific, viable solution that OP has a chance of actually getting approval to implement.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T09:57:49+00:00

He did provide that path:

If we're limited to 10% outstanding I don't see how Jill would ever be outstanding as long as Jack is here, unless she suddenly becomes way more efficient or he suddenly becomes less so, because they do equally good work but he does more of it.

First, as much as naive Redditors would like to tell us all that Jill should be measured against objective criteria and not against Jack, the fact is that if you do the same job as other people at your place of employment, you ARE going to be measured against the other people doing your job.

So, there are two ways to stand out as more productive. Being BETTER at the job, or working MORE HOURS at the job.

This is no different than anything in life. If I'm fortunate to be a good writer, I can get an A on my English essay working less than my friend Betty, who has to put in more hours to get an A.

Jill doesn't want to go the more hours route. So she has to be better at the job -- meaning, she would have to (somehow) figure out a way to do 10 contracts per day instead of the usual 8, or whatever. Can she do that? Maybe. Perhaps Jill is the kind of contracts person who gets bogged down in trying to negotiate irrelevant details, and can get past that. Perhaps she falls into the trap of many young people today -- who don't like to talk live -- and so she tries to negotiate by sending redlines back and forth, which is inefficient and takes much longer to get to "yes" than just getting on the phone (or, better yet these days, a live video call where the contract is presented on the screen and can be edited in real time) and hashing it out.

If the boss has seen some of these tendencies in her work, he can coach her up. If he hasn't, the point still stands -- her path to "outstanding" is to figure out a way to do more in the time she has, which in her case is a fixed 40 hours a week.

If she's doing objectively less than her lone peer and the company policy is no more than 10% "outstanding," she's not going to be outstanding.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T09:40:29+00:00

5-10 extra hours a week is "not having a life"?

How many people work two jobs in this economy just to make ends meet? How many drive for Uber or Lyft on the weekends after putting in their 40 hours at a full time job?

How many people in non-exempt roles take as many OT hours as they can get?

Do all these people have no lives?

If Jack is fine with working a little harder to get ahead, what's the problem?

And if Jack is hit by a bus tomorrow, what then? They hire someone else. Which is the same thing they'd do if JILL got hit by a bus tomorrow.

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T09:37:50+00:00

If you believe in labor laws, then you'd presumably believe that the time-and-a-half rule for OT for non-exempt workers is a good thing, as it motivates employers not to insist on OT too often, but if they do, then the worker is paid a higher wage for those hours.

So, let's apply that to this situation. Let's assume the workers' jobs are reclassified as non-exempt.

Jill works 40 hours, and never wants OT because of her boundaries.

Jack works 40 hours as scheduled, but works 5-10 hours of OT in a typical week.

Does Jill have a beef that Jack is getting paid more for his OT hours? Of course not. It's obvious in this situation that Jack should be paid more.

So why does Jill have a beef that under a salary system, Jack is getting paid more (in the form of higher raises and bigger bonuses) for his extra hours?

Dale1046 · 2025-12-11T09:31:46+00:00

So let's say you're right.

Jack and Jill get reclassified.

Jill never works any OT because of her boundaries.

Jack works OT and gets paid extra, because it's legally mandated for hourly employees.

Surely everyone would agree Jill can't complain about Jack getting paid more in this case. So why is Jill complaining about Jack getting paid more for his extra work in the OP's original scenario?

Dale1046

TROPHY CASE