<p>I am curious if the corporate world is taking advantage of me-</p>
<p>Situation: I have worked at a software company for two years now and I worked 55 hours the past week. My salary is $55,000 annually(certainly not very much for software) and I have been assigned to work on multiple projects which require a large amount of overtime. There are employees in the same position as me who regularly work 40 hours per week, take one hour lunch breaks, and management only assigns them one or two projects. Is this common in the work place? Is there anything I can do about this, I was recently assigned to work on five projects. I don't get paid extra for working overtime.</p>
<p>The disparity between your work and your colleague’s is certainly curious, although 40-60 hours is fairly typical of a full time job in the corporate world (or even longer hours). If your workload is unmanageable, that’s one thing, but if you’re handling it well, I suggest sticking with it for a bit. Your employers might be trying to test you or might think you are more capable than your coworkers, and when the time for promotions rolls around, you might not be sorry that you’ve put in the work you have.</p>
<p>1) You’re good at what you do and your supervisor gives you lots of projects because you are reliable and do the job right. Many supervisors have trouble balancing workloads of their employees, allocating work to those that are most reliable instead of allocating work to those that are most available.</p>
<p>2) Stuff rolls down hill and you are the low man on the totem pole, so you get all of the work that no one else wants to do. This is probably the case if everyone in your department has more seniority than you.</p>
<p>Right now I’m salaried with my current employer. We just opened up the region I’m in two months ago, so I’m working 70+ hours a week, for at least 6 days a week. We hired a few guys underneath me, but they need a little more seasoning. I take on a large amount of the work myself because we are dealing with a significant amount of capital. Basically, I don’t trust somebody else to do my job so I work my butt off. Working your butt off is never a bad thing. Don’t have the mindset of an hourly employee, have the mindset of an entrepreneur. It will pay off for you later in life.</p>
<p>My job is tech-ey/consulting-ey, and I typically have one client at a time. I work 40ish hours a week, take 45-60 minutes for lunch daily and rarely work at night or on the weekends. That said, when deadlines approach or when things go wrong, it’s completely expected to work 70+ hours in a week. We’re compensated for those extra hours with comp days, reimbursements for meals and copious amounts of vacation time.</p>
<p>I’m a consultant and while I am working 40 hours a week now, when my deliverables are due and things need to be rolled out, I’ll be working 60-80 hours a week. We’re not paid overtime, but I get paid generously and have 25 vacation days a year, amongst other benefits.</p>
<p>For me, it’s 40 hours per week, with a 10% bonus for hours worked after 6 p.m. and a 25% bonus for hours worked on Sundays. Anything beyond 40 hours is paid as 150% overtime. The federal government has good work rules.</p>