Someone on The Hill hates their IT StaffFollow

eh in some fields that is almost impossible to guess at. Service industry can generally bank on certain times of year for things, holidays, season changes, etc. Other industries such as mine for example depends on a slew of unpredictable occurrences. If I was in a salaried position I would never expect a time frame of my hours. One day I can do nothing all day, I sit at home on call sometimes because im 2 minutes from the plant, other times I stay and sit in my office doing paper work and playing gameboy. Sometimes I actually have to work.

There is no way to predict when something in the plant will fault, a drop of oil can spill off anytime on to any proxy anywhere in the plant, a robot could fault out at any time. Its just to unpredictable to give a time line.

It is a noble expectation but generally unrealistic in a great many work industries.

Yeah, we get those too. the part that I always find annoying is that many things in IT, particularily in the server arena, have to be done after hours or during weekends. It seems to me there should be some sort of compensation for work intruding into my personal rest and relaation time other than just hour per hour relocation. That 2 hour time period on saturday is "worth" more to me personally in my view than leaving 2 hours early some other day. an intact saturday means I can accomplesh a project. breaking that up into smaller chunks doesn't allow me to get as far in that project, or in some cases even start it. I definitly agree that those time chunks are required though. you can't just down the file servers during the day at a large organization. I just wish there was a mechanism in place to recognize that evening and weekend hours suck when they aren't the normal schedule. That won't ever happen though, so i'm not going to lose much sleep over it.

That is actually our official policy. But since having other people around to cover comp time costs more than just paying OT, they just pay for the OT. Once the building market improves, we will probably go back to comp time, but as of now, it's senseless to hire a spare member of management.

Not management or a supervisor but I have a similar set up on OT. I don't get paid any overtime unless I am required to work on a day which I ordinarily don't work - but even that is pretty restricted - like if someone is having a press conference on Sunday and I do a call around for them, I don't/can't(? never tried TBH) claim overtime.

But when we are asked to work all night for one reason or another, or if we had to take a regular Saturday shift we get OT.

Instead of OT I get an extra month I can either cash in as extra pay or vacation. So we all get exactly the same regardless of who works more over weekends etc, which is sort meh but w/e. Generally speaking the employer is winning on the deal, but it all depends. The last year we had a bunch of stuff happen which completely sidelined my shop so it was a lot slower than usual, and we still got the full allowance so I think it is pretty balanced.