It took the better part of a year for a small ~3000 sqft single story building to be built next to my (American) residence. Dudes showed up every weekday around 8am and left around 5pm, but they all seemed to be standing around doing nothing half of the times I passed by.
I wonder how much of that standing around is say the drywall guy standing around waiting for pipes or wiring work to be done so they could do drywall work.
Well the drywall person shouldn't be there on that day if things aren't ready for their work to be done.
I mean, I'm all for people being allowed to work at a comfortable pace, spurts of activity in between breaks or a constant medium level of activity, whatever works for that individual.
But damn do I see construction as a particularly lazy industry a lot of the time; especially after moving to the UK, they used to build things so well and so quickly here and now look: nobody wants new build houses because of the shitty construction, crossrail took HOW long and HOW much to build?
Construction ends up looking lazy because they're locked in combat with Amdahl's law. You've got a complex system of interlocking task dependencies, with tasks requiring a variety of other tasks to reach varying levels of completeness before you can start on various other tasks, which rely on specialized labor and various materials provided by various third parties.
It's hard to get good estimates of how long any individual task will take, but you don't want to be in a situation where work could be getting done, but isn't because the necessary workers aren't there, so it's more efficient to pay for workers to be present and ready to begin as soon as their unblocked, versus having to wait for those workers to show up once their blockers are cleared.
