California Test Engineer Unpaid Overtime

Test engineer jobs have many different definitions. A TE is a discipline in and of itself that has evolved to include many tasks, but at the end of the day, the test engineer has to ensure that the program she is working on passes the final test—that it performs to the expectations of the manufacturer or the end user.

Do You Qualify for Overtime?

If you are a test engineer and you are performing automated and repetitive duties, there is a strong chance that you misclassified and therefore owed a lot of overtime, regardless of your test engineer pay--either salary or hourly wages. The majority of cases that have involved test engineers have been successful.

Minimum Wage Rate

As of January1, 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.

This new rate means that anyone who is paid less than that amount has a much greater chance of prevailing on an overtime claim because that constitutes a technical violation.

Statute of Limitations

Employees can sue for overtime violations going back a period of three years. In addition, it is likely that employees would be able to go back a total of four years under unfair competition laws.

Both the state of California and federal laws specifically identify duties that are frequently performed by test engineers which do not satisfy the exempt requirements.