The flip side of being "exempt" is that you still get the salary even if you actually work very little. Last time I got into the legal language of the classification (May 2020, as we were facing furloughs), I remember that it basically said (paraphrase) "an exempt employee is entitled to the full agreed-upon salary for any week of work in which any work takes place", meaning if everything you're responsible for was working just fine and all you did that week was send one or two relevant emails, then you'd "earned your keep"
I generally appreciated this (as opposed to tracking hours) since I was in a sysadmin-like role and outside of some truly busy weeks of deployments or migrations, there was really not much to do. (A friend joked, reassuringly, at times when I found this distressing: "You're basically on retainer.")
I generally appreciated this (as opposed to tracking hours) since I was in a sysadmin-like role and outside of some truly busy weeks of deployments or migrations, there was really not much to do. (A friend joked, reassuringly, at times when I found this distressing: "You're basically on retainer.")