CIOs: Not the casual boys and girls of summer

With summer coming to a close, retail stores shifting their floor motif's to "back-to-school" and students are working on their "what I did on my summer vacation" essays. Just don't ask CIOs to produce such a missive. Many CIOs and other C-level executives have yet to take their summer vacations. Indeed, a great article in CIO Magazine is even wondering if the CIO job has become an "extreme job." Recruitment firm Harvey Nash released a survey earlier this year of 172 CIOs that found that nearly 20 percent of them worked more than 56 hours a week. About 4 percent put in more than 65 hours a week. And a not completely atypical prototype of the hyper-C-Level-exec can be found in Clyde Thomas, CIO and executive vice president of global operations and technology for eFunds, a $600 million financial services company. Thomas is pumping out nearly 70 hours a week. He's got a huge job overseeing five data centers in the United States and two abroad, managing 450 people who serve 6,000 users overall. "We do millions of transactions every minute. If something goes wrong with our technology, I want to make sure I'm involved in fixing it," he tells CIO. "Do I like handling conference calls [after midnight]? No. But if you're running operations for a company of this size, you do what you must." Still CIOs and other "extreme jobholders" do appear to love their jobs. A separate study contends that a majority of these folks love what they do and thrive under the pressure. In fact the study explains that rather than feeling exploited, "the long hours make extreme jobholders feel exalted." Clearly, globalization is also to blame for keeping CIOs at work longer.

Is your job extreme?
- read the article in CIO