Do 9-5 jobs still exist in the U.S.?
Ever since I graduated, everywhere I've worked has been 8-5. My current company is going to soon start expecting us to be in 7-5.
How many of you here work a 9-5 with a paid lunch?
Productivity keeps going up but so do working hours.
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9-5 and I work from home. Salaried, and in a department of one (me), so I do occasionally have to log in on a day off for a few minutes if something has a hard deadline.
I'm also 9-5 salaried, hybrid with 1-2 days in office each week and the rest from home. It's very nice.
Salaried can be a double-edged sword. The occasional self-motivated "I actually really need to get this done" is no big deal, but some workplaces will pile work onto salaried workers with no respect for work-life balance. So you're left with either not getting your work done and feeling stress because you can't keep up, or regularly working extra hours for free so you feel stress because you don't have enough personal time. What kind of job it is can depend really heavily on your direct supervisor and general workplace culture. I had to suffer through a few of the bad kind of salaries positions before I lucked into finding a good one.
I do get some extra load some times as a salried worker. It's my first salaried job, so I don't know if maybe I'm just lucky. Sometimes I work overtime to finish what I'v started, but compensate it the next day by starting an hour late. If the work becomes too much, i will try to work harder, but if that doesn't fix it either, it's possible to either extend the deadline or get extra help.
It's a total culture shock from my previous, hourly job, where I just had to always work more and more for the same hourly rate. They didn't care that it took longer and they didn't care for me as long as it got done, but I didn't want to work more hours, I wanted to spend more time with my kids.
My current workplace has an official policy of flexing hours for salaried employees. Which is exactly what you just described: if you work time outside of your regular hours, take comp time off for it. And my supervisor is probably the best boss I've ever had, she's super respectful of our team's time and work-life balance so we don't even need to run flex time by her. As long as we mark it on our calendars we can just do whatever. A good boss makes such a huge difference.