Richard left a comment on my response to his post regarding the minimum wage exemptions for software types.  Yeah Richard, I hate when dasBlog does that.  I really like it but sometimes it drives me nuts.

Basically, he says that my argument holds up on the assumption of a 40/hour week, but that companies are likely to abuse the 40 hour week when there is a tight job market and they know they have the upper hand.

He's absolutely right, and I've been in those situations before, getting "gouged" on workload, and, as a result, hours worked, for lower pay.  At the time I didn't have the resume to do anything about it, so I gutted it out knowing that I was only building my value.

I guess I just look at it from the standpoint that there is always something worse out there, and even if I am getting overworked and underpaid programming long hours, it still beats some other jobs where I would be paid for every hour I work, but the work would be meaningless, and the pay still wouldn't equal the low salaried job.

Either way, I think there's been a large pushback in software salaries as a result of the dotcom fiasco, and the market was flooded with charlatans that didn't know what they were doing and (no offense to VB please, I used to do VB) VB/ASP was the new hottness.  These people commanded outlandish salaries at times, especially considering their skills, companies went out of business, people lost a lot of money in the market, and tech workers were left to pick up the pieces.  It sucked for a few years there.  It's starting to turn around now finally, and hopefully we will see the bulk of software people getting back in good jobs for reasonable pay and reasonable life commitment.