This should be obvious to anyone who's ever lived in NYC. It feels normal here to see 5 MTA employees in orange safety vests standing around watching one guy putting safety cones around a puddle.
Of course if it really is 5 people watching the one guy put of cones that is waste. However most constructions jobs are let the machine work for 10 minutes, then you need 5 people for manual labor for 5 minutes before the machine works again. While it is true you have 5 people standing around watching the machine work 2/3rds of the time, there is nothing else that they could do and be back in 10 minutes so it is most cost effective to pay them to do nothing 2/3rds of the time.
Read the linked article. You'll see that it truly is waste.
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
For just one project, that's 200 paid $1,000/day to do nothing. $73 million/year wasted, just for one project.
The MTA. That's not at all an unusual amount for total compensation expenses for an employee.
Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.
I just can't help but smile and remember the scene from The Sopranos of some wiseguys seating in lawn chairs at the construction site eating pastrami sandwiches... but in a tunnel this time!
The $1000/hr is probably a bureaucrat who sat at a desk pushing papers. There is some value in that job, but it is easy to find useless make-work to appear busy withing getting anything important done.
You are being hyperbolic here, but cones around a puddle warrants a discussion.
There have been cases where I have seen portions of a station cordoned off with tape and perhaps with safety cones; however it is not my experience with NYC subway puddles in general. It feels like almost half the stations have leaky ceilings that you can see dripping during rainy weather. No safety cones. During drier days you can find these spots by stalactites and straws forming on the ceiling and by discoloration and mineral deposits on the platform. Two nights ago I noticed something much more frighting on the south bound Prince Street platform. Drip from the ceiling was freezing on the platform and formed an ice-patch a meter in diameter. There were no cones and the subway platform is not the place where I would want to slip. This is a safety issue especially as the whole platform feels only 3 meters wide.
You and I may see MTA workers milling about and appearing lazy to us, but the example of putting safety cones around a puddle doesn't pass the sniff test to me.
Maybe not putting safety cones but I recently saw 5 workers fixing some box looking component at a station. One was doing something to the box. One was holding down the 3 foot step ladder. One was shining a flashlight at the box and two others were standing behind the flashlight holder looking at the box. I wish I had taken a picture.
Obviously there's tons of waste, and maybe you were right about that example, but it's also very possible you're not. These anecdotes people love to trot out about manual labor are really silly. It makes you sound exactly like nontechnical software project management who don't understand what technical debt is or why man-hour estimation is hard.
These people are all needed. The person with the access rights is authorised to be on the system. The one taking notes is recording what's happened so we can write it up in a post-mortem. The others are watching and ensuring the person who's allowed access is doing the right thing.
If you walked past and saw it for 10 seconds you'd thing one person was working and three were standing around, but in reality they're all needed to ensure the right thing happens in the right way.
Were we guilty of the same thing as the construction workers in your example?
Your answer to that is going to sound quite similar to whatever response those workers might have. Put another way, unless you've actually worked as a subway maintenance worker, allow for the fact that there is a lot you don't know about the job.
"For a delayed rider wondering whom to blame, it’s tempting to begin with the people you can see, the 7,000 or so men and women — track cleaners, inspectors, flaggers and other orange-vested M.T.A. employees — charged with preventing these incidents and keeping the trains moving. ...
No matter how diligent they may be, 7,000-odd orange-vested maintenance workers are simply not enough to keep the deteriorating system — with its 665 miles of passenger-carrying track, enough to reach all the way to Indianapolis — on schedule. All the real problems must begin elsewhere, further up the chain of command.
The rest of the piece is an argument against the "obvious" explanation and for more systems-based explanation.