James Surowiecki

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环视现代社会，不知不觉中，加班已经成为一种“时尚”。但加班是否就是工作积极、乐于奉献的表现？加班跟工作效率的高低是否有一定的关系？为什么越来越多的年轻人“热衷”于加班？

For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day,and forgo anything resembling a normal life.2. 几十年来，年轻的银行家和华尔街的公司都有一条心照不宣的潜规则：为了高薪工作或有可能获得的极大财富，年轻分析师们一天要工作15小时，完全放弃了正常的生活。Wall Street: 华尔街，是纽约市曼哈顿区南部从百老汇路延伸到东河的一条大街道的名字，以“美国的金融中心”闻名于世，亦可指对整个美国经济具有影响力的金融市场和金融机构；pact: 协定，契约；shot: 企图，机会；obscene:可憎的，令人厌恶的；forgo: 放弃；resemble: 与……相像。But things may be changing.Last October, Goldman Sachs3. Goldman Sachs: 高盛集团，一家国际领先的投资银行和证券公司，总部设在纽约。told its junior investment-banking analysts not to work on Saturdays, and it has said that all analysts, on average,should be working no more than seventy to seventy- five hours a week. A couple of weeks ago, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said that analysts are expected to have four weekend days off a month. And, last week, Credit Suisse told its analysts that they should not be in the of fice on Saturdays.

These changes may sound small, but, in the context of the Street, they’re positively radical. Alexandra Michel, a former Goldman associate who is now on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, published a nineyear study of two big investment banks and found that people spent up to a hundred and twenty hours a week on the job. In the pre-cell-phone,pre-e-mail days, it was possible for people to find respite4. respite: 暂息。when they left the of fice. But, as David Solomon, the global co-head of investment banking at Goldman, told me, “Today, technology means that we’re all available 24/7. And, because everyone demands instant grati fication5. grati fication: 满足，满意。and instant connectivity, there are no boundaries, no breaks.”

Cry me a river, you might say. But what happened on Wall Street is just an extreme version of what’s happened to so-called knowledge workers in general. Thirty years ago, the best-paid workers in the U.S. were much less likely to6. less likely to: 不太可能。work long days than low-paid workers were. By 2006, the best paid were twice as likely to work long hours as the poorly paid, and the trend seems to be accelerating7. accelerate: 增速。. A 2008 Harvard Business School survey of a thousand professionals found that ninety-four per cent worked fifty hours or more a week, and almost half worked in excess of sixty- five hours a week. Overwork has become a credential8. credential: 资格，证书。of prosperity.

The perplexing thing about the cult of overwork is that, as we’ve known for a while, long hours diminish both productivity and quality.9. 关于加班热的一个令人费解的问题是，长时间的工作会降低生产率和质量，而这个我们都已经知道。perplexing: 令人费解的；diminish: 降低，减少。Among industrial workers, overtime raises the rate of mistakes and safety mishaps10. mishap: 灾祸，不幸事故。; likewise, for knowledge workers fatigue and sleep-deprivation make it hard to perform at a high cognitive level.11. fatigue: 疲惫，疲劳；deprivation: 剥夺，匮乏；cognitive: 认知的。As Solomon put it, past a certain point overworked people become “less ef ficient and less effective.” And the effects are cumulative12. cumulative: 累积的，渐增的。. The bankers Michel studied started to break down13. break down: 衰弱下来，出毛病。in their fourth year on the job. They suffered from depression, anxiety, and immune-system problems, and performance reviews showed that their creativity and judgment declined.14. immune-system: 免疫系统；performance: 表现，业绩。

If the bene fits of working fewer hours are this clear, why has it been so hard for businesses to embrace the idea? Simple economics certainly plays a role: in some cases, such as law firms that bill by the hour, the system can reward you for working longer, not smarter.15. bill: 给……开账单；by the hour: 按小时；reward: 回报，奖赏。And even if a person pulling all-nighters is less productive than a well-rested substitute would be, it’s still cheaper to pay one person to work a hundred hours a week than two people to work fifty hours apiece.16. 而且，即使一个通宵熬夜的人比一个得到充分休息的人效率低，给一个人工作100小时付的工资还是要比给两个人各工作50小时付得少。pull all-nighters: 通宵熬夜；substitute: 代替者；apiece: 每人，各自地。(In the case of medicine,residents work long hours not just because it’s good training but also because they’re a cheap source of labor.) On top of this, the productivity of most knowledge workers is much harder to quantify than that of, say, an assembly-line worker.17. quantify: 量化，用数量来表示；assembly-line: 装配线，流水线。So, as Bob Pozen, a former president of Fidelity Management and the author ofExtreme Productivity, a book on slashing work hours, told me, “Time becomes an easy metric to measure how productive someone is,even though it doesn’t have any necessary connection to what they achieve.”18. 鲍勃·博森是富达管理的前总裁，也是提倡减少工作时长的书《极端生产力》的作者，他曾告诉我：“时间成为衡量一个人工作能力的简单标准，虽然它跟人们的工作成效没有任何必然联系。”slash: 严厉批评，大幅削减；metric: 度量标准。

Habit, too, is powerful: things are done a certain way because that’s how they’ve been done before, and because that’s the way the people in charge19. in charge: 负责，主管。were trained. When new regulations limited medical residents’ working hours to eighty a week, many doctors complained of declining standards and mollycoddling20. mollycoddle: 溺爱，纵容。, and said that it would have a disastrous effect on training, even though residents in Europe work many fewer hours, without harming the quality of medical care. “I went through it, so you should” is a dif ficult impulse to resist.

To make these new policies stick21. stick: 产生作用。, then, banks have to change not just rules but expectations. Indeed, as Michel told me, “it isn’t really external rules that force bankers to work the way they do. It’s an entire cultural system.”She cites the example of a consulting firm that mandated that people stay out of the of fice on weekends, only to discover that they were working secretly from home.22. cite: 引用，提及；mandate: 强制执行，批准。In a culture that venerates overwork, people internalize crazy hours as the norm.23. venerate: 崇敬，尊敬；internalize:使内在化。As the anthropologist Karen Ho writes in her bookLiquidated, “On Wall Street, hard work is always overwork.” Grinding out hundred-hour weeks for years helps bankers think of themselves as tougher and more dedicated than everyone else. And working fifteen hours a day doesn’t just demonstrate your commitment to a company; it also reinforces that commitment. Over time, the simple fact that you work so much becomes proof that the job is worthwhile, and being in the of fice day and night becomes a kind of permanent initiation ritual. The challenge for Wall Street is: can it still get bankers to run with the pack if it stops treating them like dogs?