California Quality Assurance Engineer Overtime

The QA engineer's job has become more functional. A QA engineer's duties focus on making sure customer and company requirements are systematically and reliably satisfied. However, QA engineers are not typically involved in true design and often they exercise minimal discretion and independent judgment. If the duties performed regularly are routine, repetitive, automated, or are not intellectually varied in nature, then they are probably owed a lot of overtime pay.

Do You Qualify for Overtime?

If you are a QA engineer and you perform many automated and repetitive duties, there is a strong chance that you are owed overtime in California, regardless of your quality assurance engineer pay or title--either salary or hourly wages. However, there is a caveat: If you are paid on an hourly basis, California has a minimum rate that must be paid for every hour you work.

Minimum Wage Rate

As of January 1, 2008 the California Legislature passed a new law that will effectively eliminate overtime for a large portion of California's computer programmers. The law "resets" the minimum hourly rate of pay to $36.00 per hour. In 2001, a base rate of pay of $41.00 per hour was set, provided that it increase by a cost-of-living increase each year. Following these increases, the minimum pay was $49.77 for 2007. However, the new law sets the base rate to $36.00 and the cost-of-living increases will start being based on this number for 2009.

Statute of Limitations

Quality assurance engineers, software engineers, or computer programmers are advised to contact a California labor law attorney immediately because the landscape in the industry is changing rapidly.