5 ms·

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 pu

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.

aleyan 9y ago
> 5 MTA employees in orange safety vests standing around watching one guy putting safety cones around a puddle. 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.
- h1srf 9y ago
  > You are being hyperbolic here, but cones around a puddle warrants a discussion. 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.
  - sitharus 9y ago
    Frequently at my job we end up with a bunch of people around a computer. One is typing and has all the access rights. Another is taking notes about what has happened and a couple more are watching. 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.
  - gipp 9y ago
    Maybe the problems with the component couldn't be diagnosed by the agents assigned to the platform. Maybe there was further work that needed doing on the same job that required more of them, and there was no point in leaving for 10 minutes and coming back. Maybe they were just wrapping up. 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.
    - h1srf 9y ago
      While possible, having first hand experience working for the MTA (not NYCT though) led me to believe that it was most likely not the case.
  - reificator 9y ago
    Just today I had four other people standing around my machine, mostly saying nothing as I tried different things. Over the course of about 45 minutes (and coming and going back to their own machines) they each contributed invaluable assistance in resolving the issue. But there were easily gaps of 10 minutes at a time where nothing was said. Were we guilty of the same thing as the construction workers in your example?
  - mikestew 9y ago
    You know how someone might look at your typical software developer and conclude that, though they might type something on the keyboard once in a while, a lot of the time they're just staring off into space or just about anything other than type? >$100K/year, shouldn't they be doing more typing? 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.
bluGill 9y ago
Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste. 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.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste. 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.
  - WoodenChair 9y ago
    In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands. The MTA. That's not at all an unusual amount for total compensation expenses for an employee.
    - bgentry 9y ago
      The $1,000/day figure comes directly from the NYT article quoting the head of construction at the MTA. This is the paragraph after the one I quoted previously: 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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 9y ago
From the submitted piece, "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.

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.

aleyan 9y ago

> 5 MTA employees in orange safety vests standing around watching one guy putting safety cones around a puddle. 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.

h1srf 9y ago
> You are being hyperbolic here, but cones around a puddle warrants a discussion. 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.
- sitharus 9y ago
  Frequently at my job we end up with a bunch of people around a computer. One is typing and has all the access rights. Another is taking notes about what has happened and a couple more are watching. 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.
- gipp 9y ago
  Maybe the problems with the component couldn't be diagnosed by the agents assigned to the platform. Maybe there was further work that needed doing on the same job that required more of them, and there was no point in leaving for 10 minutes and coming back. Maybe they were just wrapping up. 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.
  - h1srf 9y ago
    While possible, having first hand experience working for the MTA (not NYCT though) led me to believe that it was most likely not the case.
- reificator 9y ago
  Just today I had four other people standing around my machine, mostly saying nothing as I tried different things. Over the course of about 45 minutes (and coming and going back to their own machines) they each contributed invaluable assistance in resolving the issue. But there were easily gaps of 10 minutes at a time where nothing was said. Were we guilty of the same thing as the construction workers in your example?
- mikestew 9y ago
  You know how someone might look at your typical software developer and conclude that, though they might type something on the keyboard once in a while, a lot of the time they're just staring off into space or just about anything other than type? >$100K/year, shouldn't they be doing more typing? 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.

bluGill 9y ago

Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste. 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.

chimeracoder 9y ago
> Having been in construction I question if that obvious thing is really waste. 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.
- WoodenChair 9y ago
  In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > In what world are construction workers paid $1000/day? That's an exaggeration, but your point stands. The MTA. That's not at all an unusual amount for total compensation expenses for an employee.
  - bgentry 9y ago
    The $1,000/day figure comes directly from the NYT article quoting the head of construction at the MTA. This is the paragraph after the one I quoted previously: 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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

scott_s 9y ago

From the submitted piece, "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.