1. Are you working in a company that has work locations distributed across the globe?
2. Alternatively are you in a project that requires you to interact with people in different timezones?
3. Are you an expert in your domain?
4. Do you need to provide expert consultation across timezones?
5. Or do you need to interact with multiple customers in different timezones?
6. Is your supervisor in a different timezone?

I guess this is a decent enough set of questions. If your answer is yes to more than one of the above questions - you are probably putting in hours way beyond what is expected and hence by definition you are in an extreme job. This probably applies to anyone who has spent at least 3-5 years in the technology industry (I think IT is too limiting especially since many of us work in companies that are defining future technological products) and has gained reasonable domain expertise.

In fact if you do not find yourself answering yes to any of the questions above then you probably need to re-examine your career situation and take some hard decisions!

In this situation I think extreme steps need to be taken to ensure people stay motivated and committed. As a quick aside in a recent employee survey work life balance and training/developmental opportunities came up as key concerns for a significant majority in my company. In this context I really like the ROWE model and I very quickly forwarded the Businessweek article to my HR manager. Let’s see how it goes.

It was refereshing to see that Craigslist, which is is among the top 10 most popular Web sites by many measures, refuses to play by society’s unwritten rules.

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?column=Net%20Sense

This really helps people who experience the following:
1) Extreme schedule (60 hours/week)
2) Regret for not being able to spend more time with family and kids.

However, for others, I am not sure this could be effective across workforce or across job roles.

It may backfire in the following situations.

>> For an entry level employee - He may be an excellent programmer who can finish the job at home. But his learning goes much beyond that. He must be acquainted with professional way of doing things like attending meetings, etiquette, brainstorming etc which is hard to imbibe if he is given the option to work from home.

>> Building a Corporate culture - It hurts the efforts of the company to arrange programs to build awareness about itself to its employees. Employees prefer to skip the CEO ‘Gyan’ and don’t participate in anything other than their regular assigned job. Some companies have yoga/meditation (not compulsory of course) in the morning which employees may participate and that becomes a part of their culture. Some companies in Japan even run mandatory programs.

>> Attrition - Plenty of employees’ don’t leave their employers because they love the “feel” of the company. They feel nice to work in their company. This “Feel” could range from bright colored walls to pizza eating contests to evening football matches.
If the option to work from home is given, employees may no longer show the enthusiasm to participate in the outside job activities.

Hence, the privilege of flexi work life should be provided with discretion.

Thanks,
Arun.PC

In my opinion, a good way to go about an extreme job is this: Work hard when it is necessary. It is unlikely that there will be a need to work out of one’s skin for more than 4-6 months at a stretch. When work is light, just take a long while off to rejuvenate, take a vacation etc. I wonder why most IT companies dont do this. The Best Buy way seems great to me. Get the job done and do what you like at other times. That way one can lead a balanced life, despite being part of a high intensity work environment.