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I.T. Hours

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by ktm99

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What has been your experience with required hours in IT. A regular 40hr week or more?

9 replies

by nd_it

It varies or myself, some weeks I am watching the clock, others I am sitting at me desk at 7:00pm on a Friday when everyone else is starting their weekend. But I would have to say on the average about 45 hours a week.

by cactus pete

My last job had me there from 7:30 to 6:00. Usually with phone calls from other countries [and my own] in the wee hours.

Now I work 35 hours a week, and I'm having a hard time filling them.

by thechas

If your IT staff does not need to work some extra time, you may be over-staffed.

An old formula recommends 10% overtime hours as the 'optimum' staffing level.

If OT is less than 10%, the cost of benefits exceeds the cost of overtime pay.
(I would not be surprised if it is 20% or more with the current cost of health-care.)

Further, there are many IT tasks that need to be performed when users are off-line.
Unless you have a large IT staff, you have to compromise support to perform off-hour tasks.

Chas

by ktm99

If you work OT are you being compensated for it.
If you are on call are you compensated for it.

We are trying to find out what the norm is as far as your salary is based. ie:40hrs

by cactus pete

When I mentioned that in my last job I worked a LOT of overtime, I was not compensated.

Now, however, after my normal 35 hours, up to 40, I am paid straight time. Over 40 and it's overtime. Overtime on a holiday is double.

by tomsal

How my company handles pay is like this -- if you are a supervisor or "less" (not meant to sound demeaning I just don't know how else to explain it) you are paid by the hour. So over 40 hours is OT. But (lucky me) if you are a manager or "higher" (ie. Executive) you are paid salary and do not qualify for OT regardless of the hours you put in beyond 40. So you work 60 hours or 40 hours a week, your paycheck looks the same either way.

I consistently been averaging about 47 hours per week sinceJanuary of this year. Of course this doesn't factor in being called when I'm at home either.

And no, I don't get any "bonus" pay for afterhour support calls -- its all "part of your salary" -- as the boss told me.

Thank god that I'm rarely called afterhours.

by madroxxx

I have been averaging about 58 hours a week for the past 2 months. I'm salary so that pretty much sucks. I am almost through the major projects I have going now and plan to return to a 45 hour work week after a much needed vacation.

by clearsmashdrop

My last two jobs I was an hourly member of the staff. That meant 40 hour weeks for the most part. Of course it is not uncommon to get a call 5 minutes before you leave that requires 45 minutes to take care of.

During 2001 I was probably working 4-5 hours of OT every two weeks. Nothing too harsh. During most of 2002 I worked almost no OT because there was not much to do.

by firstpeter

In my experience it depends upon the type of IT work. If you are primarily technical support for a large company, you're probably looking at 40 a week maybe a little more when you take that call five minutes before you leave.

If you're tech support for a small company, I would expect you're probably looking at 45 a week, since you probably don't have a lot of folks on shifts that can handle the phones.

System admins, network folks, Exchange admins, etc., are probably 45-50/week, considering there is quite a bit of after-hours activity associated with those titles (people tend to throw fits if you take the network down in the middle of the day).

Just some comments based on what I've seen / dealt with in the past.

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