4 Myths About Construction Debunked

I'm an electrician and I got paid to stand on a job site for a whole month just to make sure nothing went wrong.. because down time would cost the company $10,000 an hour...

I asked a bunch of "standing around" workers one day why there were 4 guys watching one guy dig in the hole - the answer was "Only one person can fit in the hole". I then watched them swap diggers out every few minutes and got the hole dug a lot faster then a single guy could do it. 5 guys doing 1 minute of hard work moves more dirt then one guy digging hard for 5 minutes.

My whole job revolves around me being in a building making sure boilers are running. 99% of the time I do nothing but that other 1% saves us from losing the entire facility

Recently switched to a manual trade and the first thing that struck me is always being on display. Office workers take breaks, goof off, play on their phones, rest, stretch, sit back and think. It's all part of being human, as opposed to a robot. But tradesmen working outdoors are publicly visible all day. It's frustrating to work hard for 2 hours at something most people couldn't handle doing, only to take a 15 minute break and know all the people driving past are mentally accusing you of laziness.

As a custodian who cleans office buildings, I can confirm that office workers do a lot of sitting around.

People often ask, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" The engineer responds, "The glass is twice as big as it needs to be." Cost/benefit analysis is engineering in a nutshell.

I was paid to just stand around as part of my construction crew. Occasionally I would hold stuff or grab a box, but the whole point of 16 year old me being there was so the requirement of a three-man crew was fulfilled. I wasn't there to actually do anything because it was specialized work and the two other guys were the only ones who could really do it and they didn't want or need help but were required to have a third person. I got paid minimum wage to hover around and watch them lay the tile and occasionally grab something slightly out of someone's reach

Construction worker here. Worked for the DOT for six years. Barely did anything but stand around. We still haven’t finished that bridge.

Ive moved some tons of gravel this week with a shovel and wheel barrow. You DO need lots of breaks if you want to be able to last the day or week.

One of my FEM teacher loved this quote "Literally anyone can design a bridge, but only an engineer can design a bridge that barely stands"

Regarding the "foundation on bedrock" myth, Chilean here. Bedrock can move and it does, sometimes quite violently, so it isn't a guarantee of durability. There's an old church in Santiago (Iglesia de San Francisco), a very big building, only survivor from 16-17th century. The reason of its resilience against earthquakes was recently found: its foundations lay over a bed of round rocks deliberately placed there; the whole thing rolls over the rocks when there's a quake. That's engineering.

I worked physical labor for a long time and sometimes people are just standing around. They're not all inspectors, quality control, or jobsite supervisors. It's not a myth and it doesn't need to be explained or excused. People don't work all day nonstop in an office either. There are often other things to do but not everyone is going to be motivated to work nonstop. We aren't machines.

I work as a ‘scientist’ (whatever that means) for an engineering firm and spend 90% of time on construction sites standing around with traffic controllers, drillers, service locators and engineers waiting for one of the mess of contractors to figure out what’s going on so we can drill a couple holes, log some cores and get a couple samples. It’s like herding cats in a burning hedge maze….

Used to work on paving roads long ago. This one time, the foreman who watches and measures the height of the paver was gone for about 30 mins. Little did they know the paver had dipped .5 inches during that time and that who section was ruined. Cost the company about $200k because that one person standing around monitoring the level of the paver was absent.

“Construction workers might see you just sitting around in the office” me sitting around in the office watching this video instead of working

I was an industrial electrician for 30 years. Once in a while I had to step through a door away from the hot dirty and kinda dark factory floor and work on electrical problems in bright air conditioned offices with their comfy (literally) $1000 chairs. While those office workers were hanging around the water cooler or or likely looking at their stocks online, they were often talking about the lazy line workers on the other side of the wall. The vast majority of people that work on the line have every second of the day mapped out for them, time study makes sure they are never idle. They can't even go to the bathroom when they need to without first getting permission and someone to take their place on the line. The same office worker that could take a break anytime they needed to harped about how the line worker got too much break time. I worked in an office for a while, a whole lot of time was taken up with what was called networking and on Friday people disappeared early to beat the traffic. Call it what you want, if those guys on the line had time to do it, it would be called something a lot more negative. I am sometimes surprised any work gets done in an office.

I used to work for overhead network construction in the then state owned telecoms company. A farmer once complained to the office that he had been watching a two man crew sitting in their van drinking tea for a full 45 minutes. Having ranted about laziness, lack of supervision, how easy we all had it and that we should all be sacked because we were useless, he was asked what time it happened. Turns out the crew were on their lunch hour.

I call this standing around "leaning on your shovel." I am in IT, not construction anymore, but I sometimes get called into meetings to "lean on my shovel" - being present to share information, give instructions when needed or just to observe.

As someone who once read a book about Roman history, I can say with authority that Roman construction workers often stood around while their servants built the roads.

As a civil engineer who spent a few years working for a Geotech company, I've seen a lot of residential construction. For pipes and utilities, who comprises a lot of work out on the street, there were 5-6 man crews where at any given time it would look like guys were just standing around. It's just the nature of some construction. Many times they have to wait for the machine operator to finish digging a section before they can get back to assembling or placing something.