The field guide: tech workers
The industry’s paperwork — equity grants, “unlimited” PTO, the computer-professional exemption, the layoff email — runs on rules most tech workers have never read. Read them before the reorg, not after.
1 · The exemption with a number in it
Tech runs on the assumption that everyone technical is exempt. The computer-professional exemption is narrower than the org chart: it carries its own statutory pay floor, adjusted annually, and a duties test aimed at genuinely creative, high-level systems work — and it expressly excludes trainees, entry-level roles, and workers primarily engaged in operating, servicing, or supporting computers rather than designing what runs on them.1 QA analysts, IT support, ops engineers, junior developers under close direction: many are simply misclassified, which converts years of sixty-hour weeks into the overtime arithmetic our exemption primer walks through. The general white-collar exemptions have their own tests; “we’re all salaried here” satisfies none of them.
2 · Equity, read as a contract
Options and RSUs are governed by the grant documents, and the week you most need to have read them is the week you cannot negotiate: termination. The questions that matter — what happens to unvested shares, how long the post-termination exercise window runs, what “cause” means in the plan, whether a vesting cliff sits days past your end date — all have answers in the paperwork, and several are negotiable in a severance conversation: extended exercise windows, acceleration through a cliff, treatment in the next liquidity event. A termination dated one week before a vesting date is not automatically unlawful, but timed terminations around vesting are exactly the kind of fact that, joined to a protected complaint or a leave, turns paperwork into a case. Bring the grant documents with the severance packet; we read them together.
3 · “Unlimited” PTO, honestly decoded
Traditional accrued vacation is a wage, paid out at separation. Truly unlimited PTO accrues nothing — and pays out nothing — which is much of its appeal to employers. The honest analysis is factual: a policy that is “unlimited” on paper but managed like an accrual system — tracked balances, effective caps, denials that ration time — can vest like the accrual system it actually is. If your offer letter said unlimited and your manager kept a spreadsheet, keep the spreadsheet.
4 · The layoff email and its statutes
California’s WARN Act is broader than the federal one: covered employers owe sixty days’ notice of mass layoffs, with pay and benefits for the shortfall when notice comes late — and the pay-in-lieu email does not erase the analysis of whether the statute was satisfied.2 Around the notice sit the claims layoffs actually generate: the “eliminated” role reposted within the quarter, selection lists that skew by age or leave status, and severance packets with fourteen-day deadlines our annotated specimen decodes. The mobility rules complete the picture: your non-compete is void, your notice rights under the 2024 statutes are real, and the trade-secret letter that follows your resignation has a standard, effective answer — all covered in the mobility series.
5 · Your paper trail
The grant agreements and the plan (request them; you signed them once). Offer letter and every comp-change email. Your actual duties, in a two-week diary, against the exemption tests. The layoff communications with timestamps. And the Slack messages that show 11 p.m. work from a “salaried” role. Tech generates the most complete evidentiary record in the modern economy; the industry’s only advantage is that nobody exports it. Export it, then write to us.
Notes
- Lab. Code §515.5.
- Lab. Code §§1400–1408 (Cal-WARN).
Related writing: Exempt or not: your title is not the test · The non-compete you signed is almost certainly void · A severance agreement, annotated
This article states California law as of its revision date and is analysis, not legal advice. Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising.