Hamner Law Offices, APC - California Labor & Employment Attorneys

Many employees in the computer technology field work long hours and weekends and are erroneously paid a salary without premium overtime pay. Under California law, many computer Information Technology (IT), Information Services (IS), and Computer Tech jobs are entitled to awards of back overtime pay going back four years.

It is a common mistake for employees to believe that they are not entitled to overtime pay because they are paid a salary, are highly skilled, or supervise other workers. Many IT, IS, and Computer Tech workers should be getting paid overtime even though they are salaried. In fact, all employees are entitled to overtime unless their employer can establish that they are exempt from overtime under one of four exemptions, managerial, administrative, learned professional, and outside sales. These exemptions require that more than 50% of an employee’s time be spent on exempt duties. Most computer technology tasks do not qualify as exempt.

Positions Which Must Be Paid Overtime

Whether a current or former employee, one worker can represent the interests of the entire staff to change the way employees are paid and recover four years of back pay for everyone. This is true for IT or IS staff, and other technical staff such as Quality Assurance (QA) Engineers, Test Engineers, and Software Engineers (such as SE I-III positions). Our office has secured class action recoveries on behalf of systems administrators, systems analysts, systems specialists, systems management, systems developers, senior systems administrators, UNIX infrastructure administrators, software engineers, site content developers, integrators, network engineers, network security specialists, technical support specialists, desktop support technicians, helpdesk positions, support technicians, technology team, systems developers, telecom/telephony managers and engineers, communications specialists and supervisors, communications consultants, communications managers, IT engineers, network engineers, and others.

If you spend most of your time grinding out code and are not allowed to perform more intellectually challenging tasks, such as those associated with software architecture, analysis, and design, you may be misclassified and entitled to back overtime pay. If your company treats you as code monkeys, they must pay overtime.

Some employers have “reclassified” IT and other high tech positions from salaried to hourly and started paying overtime pay. Most, however, fail to pay the four years of back pay owed for previous overtime hours worked. If you have been reclassified, contact us.

Common IT Positions Eligible for Overtime Pay

• Installing and upgrading hardware and software
• Configuring desktop computers and applications
• Analyzing, testing and troubleshooting equipment, applications, networks
• Correcting hardware and software problems and network connectivity issues
• Installation and maintenance of telecommunications systems

Type of IT Work Which are Eligible for Overtime Pay

• Design, testing and deployment of new computer configurations
• Analysis and selection of new technology
• Formulating management polices for user rights and security.
• Working with vendors to determine system selections based on price, technical functionality, and support
• Documenting technical processes and organizational guidelines Advising upper management about IT issues