In the following cases, should the court find that the employees were exempt employees who received a salary or hourly employees entitled to overtime pay?

a. Laurie Young was hired by Cerner Corporation as a software engineer at a salary of $65,000, one pay grade above Cerner’s entry-level salary for new engineers. The position description for Young’s position stated that she would be responsible for writing computer code to user specifications. During her employment, however, she did not write any computer code, nor did she develop or execute her own test plans. Instead, Young tested systems and programs using a tool called Informatica that allowed her to determine if a program was pulling the correct data from a database. If she determined that it was not pulling the correct data, she would change the statements in the program to look for other data transformations offered by Informatica to resolve the problem. On one occasion, she spent a month writing modifications to a stored computer procedure that was available to other users. [Young v. Cerner Corp., 2007 WL 2463205 (W.D. Mo. 2007).]

b. Two Starbucks store managers, Sean Pendlebury of Boca Raton and Laurel Overton of Delroy Beach, Florida, claim that they should not be exempt from earning overtime because the bulk of their duties are not managerial. Like baristas–hourly employees who wait on customers, make drinks, or lean the store–Pendlebury and Overton make lattes—and serve customers. They allege that less than 10 percent of their time is spent on managerial tasks. They are paid a flatsalary that is higher than a barista’s pay, but baristas earn overtime pay if they work more than forty hours per week. [Pendlebury v. Starbucks Coffee Co., 518 F.Supp. 2d 1345 (S.D. Fla. 2007).]