4 ms·

What happened to construction productivity? Part 1: Measurement

38 points by throw0101a 5y ago

geeB 5y ago
It would be interesting to see the breakdown of total dollar value by type of construction. For example where I live there seem to be mostly (by total number of units) large multi-family buildings, and then a smaller number of new custom homes and additions/large remodels. My experience goes against what the article says about hours for the custom/remodeling jobs. It seems that here GCs give an estimate for a project, but based on an estimate of hours, and the final bill will come in based on the hours. Similarly, subcontractors will give an estimate of the total, but then will have labor in their invoices to the GCs, which then get passed on to the customer. If anything, there seems to be a tendency of being very generous to say the least with what counts as a work hour. Especially GCs dropping people off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon and "project managing" the rest of the day, but in some cases stuff like commutes, lunch, breaks, etc seems to make it into the count. That said, it might be specific to my area, or this type of construction is minimal in total dollar value compared to the industry, so I'm not arguing against the main point of the article. Even if we halve the real hours, construction's productivity gains are nowhere near the gains of agriculture or manufacturing, probably just enough to get back to the peak of the late 60s. And in any case, as a customer I pay for the final project so the inflated hours still count for my view of productivity.
ginko 5y ago
The first plot(general productivity vs US construction productivity) looks startingly similar to this one(productivity vs minimum wage): https://www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/MinimumWageProductivityJuly2019-01.png https://www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/...
- nthot 5y ago
  Are you implying a relationship between the two plots?
  - smolder 5y ago
    There's a website I saw linked on HN that implies relationships between many such graphs: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Arrath 5y ago
I'd be curious to see these productivity dips and gains plotted against the average age/time in service of the workforce. In my experience (highway/heavy industrial construction) both industry and institution is suffering greatly from the loss of more experienced hands without a proper training/mentoring pipeline to bring new folks up to speed. Not only in the glut of middle managers in industry who serve more to obstruct the flow of work than assist it, but also the loss of institutional knowledge embodied by employees with decades of experience. I've seen projects grind to a standstill, or take that much longer to start, as technical questions get bounced around state/federal agencies forever with the general tune of "I don't know anything about that, XXX in dept Y was our guy for that but he retired 9 years ago. I don't want to be responsible for this so let's ask another dept." Each bounce adding weeks to the timeline. I started working in '07, and got one good summer construction season under my belt before everything crashed and burned. I watched first hand as belt-tightening took its effect across industry, those more junior were shown the door and those with seniority were kept and cherished, or they chose to retire. The effects of this are showing even now, those with seniority who chose to stay then have been retiring since. In union terms there is a big gap in the journeymen level folks between the 20-30+ year guys and the fresh faced apprentices. Decades of pushing kids towards STEM and collegiate programs while fostering some form of disdain for blue collar work may also play into this, but those are societal questions way outside my realm.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  I don't know that it's so much disdain for blue collar work as what you described right here: the work is unstable. My uncle, both cousins, and brother-in-law are all glaziers. The uncle and cousins have been trying to run a family business for decades and it's boom and bust over and over. My brother-in-law has stuck with the unions and he was making 90k a year when I was still in college, things were great. Then 2008 happened and he was almost completely unemployed for two years and got addicted to heroin and went to prison briefly. He was doing okay again recently with more construction booms in Southern California, but with the shift to work from home and possible death of commercial office buildings, how much longer will that last? White collar work isn't necessarily guaranteed to never experience a bust, but your skills are mostly pretty portable across industries. HR, accounting, management are similar enough no matter what industry you're in. If you lay glass for office buildings, there isn't much else you can do if people stop building office buildings. You can be doing great one year, then the next your career no longer exists. Additionally, what the heck do you do if you get hurt? My dad is a retired plumber but pushed me into college because of his constant physical misery from playing sports on top of manual labor. And lo and behold, I had severe spine problems in my mid-30s. Three surgeries in 16 months. Two fusions. I couldn't put my own shoes on for two years. I'd have been done as a skilled trade. But I can easily enough keep typing on a laptop even if I can't walk any more.
zz865 5y ago
100 years ago the majority of workers were unskilled or semi skilled bodies desperate to do anything. People died or were maimed. Now 70% of Americans go to college, no one wants to work outside in those conditions and the wages are so low you can't afford to raise a family.
- cafard 5y ago
  Nobody wants to work outside at wages so low. A co-worker years ago was the son of a construction worker. One winter his father was on a job site in New York, within easy view of an office building. Some of the clerical staff in an office put up a sign in the window: "It's 70 Degrees In Here". The construction workers put up their own sign: "It's $X/hour Out Here", $X being considerably higher than the going wage for clerical workers.
  - animal_spirits 5y ago
    Wow those clerical workers are assholes.
    - floor2 5y ago
      Ya, these obviously fake class-warfare anecdotes are weird. People retell and repost them as if they were real, despite being obviously made up to show group X being bad/dumb/naive and group Y being good/smart/wise.
  - RDaneel0livaw 5y ago
    that's exactly it. Of course there will be some people who turn their nose at outdoor construction work, but the much bigger reason is the pay is just not livable. In KY the average pay for a construction worker is $14 an hour. You can't buy a house or raise a family with that.
- retrac 5y ago
  From what I can tell of labour history, 1921 would actually be /after/ most of the increases in labour safety and labour standards. The gap between 1871 and 1921 on that one is probably bigger than 1921 and 2021. The 48 or 40 hour week was long established by 1921 while 80 hr was standard in the early industrial revolution. American life expectancy also increased about 20 years or so in the years leading up to the 1920s.
nwah1 5y ago
One of the things that comes to mind about why it is so hard to measure things in this industry is that almost nothing is commodified, and the commodities and specifications are all at the component level, which vary wildly over time. If you want to measure the productivity of steel production over time, you can get a reliable measure of what the prices were in 1979 and what they are today. A "house" or a "building" is not a commodity, though. There are prefab structures which are more commodity-like, but they are the exception, not the rule. And then to top it all off, the costs of acquisition differ wildly depending upon where you are. Land values are hard to filter out in the reported data. Labor issues are different based on where you are. Etc. In the recreational vehicle industry, there are different classes of vehicles. Things are pretty standardized. You can get a rough sense of improvements or regressions over time, in terms of both price and quality. A class A vehicle is not the same as a class C vehicle. You can track fuel efficiency over time. And the factories are fixed in location, and there is no locational value to filter out. There is no such official classification system for homes. We have informal names for the various styles of homes, but they have no formalized meanings or reliable reporting. But in a world where prefab construction became commonplace, this may be another matter. And if construction took on this form, arguably the quality over time could improve. Why is automotive glass so much better than the glass we use in residential windows? Why is the attention to detail so much better in cars than in homes? I'm sure the annual tax penalty on buildings doesn't help... something vehicle owners don't have to deal with. And I'm sure the rampant speculation in land doesn't help either. Both could be improved by shifting taxes off of buildings and onto land. But of course, prefab construction is outright illegal in much of the US.
MAGZine 5y ago
I worked at PlanGrid for five or so years, and these sad looking graphs are really what inspired a lot of my colleagues. Even if the data is fuzzy, the directionality says a lot. Construction is hard, and it's getting harder. New code and regulation is hard. The contractor/subcontractor relationship is hard, and it produces a lot of bad anti-patterns in "cover your ass," or doing things that are just plain wrong, but are what was written down. Perhaps worst is that the tools have only marginally improved. A hammer is still a hammer, and a nailgun is still a nailgun. Hanging drywall doesn't go faster than it did 30 years ago really. Though, as homes/buildings get more complicated, it only serves to need more specialists, more cooks in the kitchen, and slower results. Heck, just look at the cost to build a mile of highway. And that's a relatively simple construction. Yet when you look at what goes into it, all of the people involved, all of the engineering that goes into it, and all of the fixtures that are required to "finish," a road to a modern standard, it's expensive. Construction is one area where there just really is little replacement for hard work.
- someguydave 5y ago
  Even worse, construction is hard work with heavy, low cost and bulky things. The “logistics revolution” in retail therefore can do little to help.
- letitbeirie 5y ago
  > to a modern standard We let perfect be the enemy of good a lot here. Environmental regs, construction standards, and the ADA bring a lot of benefits but they've made it so there's so such thing as a minor project anymore.
  - MAGZine 5y ago
    Sort of... there's still a lot of horse trading that goes on in getting things approved for build. sometimes they build things that aren't perfectly specced, but are acceptable, especially if you're willing to go above and beyond in other areas which might be easier for you to accomplish. but yes, overall, codes become more complicated and it gets harder to build. the quality is better, but it is slower. one of my old coworkers started a startup to help people navigate codes faster and understand the specifications, which in of itself can be a hindrance wrt the permitting process (though that's only one part of construction).
Certified 5y ago
I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district I attended, all the vocational and shop classes were eliminated in the mid-90s to make budget for the creation of Cisco networking certification classes that were canned less than 10 years later. This re-budgeting was going on in school districts across America. High school shop after high school shop sold machine tools that they had taught kids on since the 60s and 70s at pennies on the dollar. 10-20 years later when parents started demanding vocational classes back, the school districts realized that modern machine tools are too expensive to get back into schools unless they can pass multi-million dollar bonds. Generally, only the best funded schools in the best run districts have had good enough organization and motivation to make these bonds happen since. As a result, you get one or two specialty shop classes at a single magnet high school in well-funded school districts, but they are few and far between. This was just my n=1 experience and perspective in my particular corner of the world. I would love to hear if other students or faculty from those eras had similar or dissimilar experiences.

38 points by throw0101a 5y ago

geeB 5y ago

It would be interesting to see the breakdown of total dollar value by type of construction. For example where I live there seem to be mostly (by total number of units) large multi-family buildings, and then a smaller number of new custom homes and additions/large remodels. My experience goes against what the article says about hours for the custom/remodeling jobs. It seems that here GCs give an estimate for a project, but based on an estimate of hours, and the final bill will come in based on the hours. Similarly, subcontractors will give an estimate of the total, but then will have labor in their invoices to the GCs, which then get passed on to the customer. If anything, there seems to be a tendency of being very generous to say the least with what counts as a work hour. Especially GCs dropping people off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon and "project managing" the rest of the day, but in some cases stuff like commutes, lunch, breaks, etc seems to make it into the count. That said, it might be specific to my area, or this type of construction is minimal in total dollar value compared to the industry, so I'm not arguing against the main point of the article. Even if we halve the real hours, construction's productivity gains are nowhere near the gains of agriculture or manufacturing, probably just enough to get back to the peak of the late 60s. And in any case, as a customer I pay for the final project so the inflated hours still count for my view of productivity.

ginko 5y ago

The first plot(general productivity vs US construction productivity) looks startingly similar to this one(productivity vs minimum wage): https://www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/MinimumWageProductivityJuly2019-01.png https://www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/...

nthot 5y ago
Are you implying a relationship between the two plots?
- smolder 5y ago
  There's a website I saw linked on HN that implies relationships between many such graphs: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Arrath 5y ago

I'd be curious to see these productivity dips and gains plotted against the average age/time in service of the workforce. In my experience (highway/heavy industrial construction) both industry and institution is suffering greatly from the loss of more experienced hands without a proper training/mentoring pipeline to bring new folks up to speed. Not only in the glut of middle managers in industry who serve more to obstruct the flow of work than assist it, but also the loss of institutional knowledge embodied by employees with decades of experience. I've seen projects grind to a standstill, or take that much longer to start, as technical questions get bounced around state/federal agencies forever with the general tune of "I don't know anything about that, XXX in dept Y was our guy for that but he retired 9 years ago. I don't want to be responsible for this so let's ask another dept." Each bounce adding weeks to the timeline. I started working in '07, and got one good summer construction season under my belt before everything crashed and burned. I watched first hand as belt-tightening took its effect across industry, those more junior were shown the door and those with seniority were kept and cherished, or they chose to retire. The effects of this are showing even now, those with seniority who chose to stay then have been retiring since. In union terms there is a big gap in the journeymen level folks between the 20-30+ year guys and the fresh faced apprentices. Decades of pushing kids towards STEM and collegiate programs while fostering some form of disdain for blue collar work may also play into this, but those are societal questions way outside my realm.

nonameiguess 5y ago
I don't know that it's so much disdain for blue collar work as what you described right here: the work is unstable. My uncle, both cousins, and brother-in-law are all glaziers. The uncle and cousins have been trying to run a family business for decades and it's boom and bust over and over. My brother-in-law has stuck with the unions and he was making 90k a year when I was still in college, things were great. Then 2008 happened and he was almost completely unemployed for two years and got addicted to heroin and went to prison briefly. He was doing okay again recently with more construction booms in Southern California, but with the shift to work from home and possible death of commercial office buildings, how much longer will that last? White collar work isn't necessarily guaranteed to never experience a bust, but your skills are mostly pretty portable across industries. HR, accounting, management are similar enough no matter what industry you're in. If you lay glass for office buildings, there isn't much else you can do if people stop building office buildings. You can be doing great one year, then the next your career no longer exists. Additionally, what the heck do you do if you get hurt? My dad is a retired plumber but pushed me into college because of his constant physical misery from playing sports on top of manual labor. And lo and behold, I had severe spine problems in my mid-30s. Three surgeries in 16 months. Two fusions. I couldn't put my own shoes on for two years. I'd have been done as a skilled trade. But I can easily enough keep typing on a laptop even if I can't walk any more.

zz865 5y ago

100 years ago the majority of workers were unskilled or semi skilled bodies desperate to do anything. People died or were maimed. Now 70% of Americans go to college, no one wants to work outside in those conditions and the wages are so low you can't afford to raise a family.

cafard 5y ago
Nobody wants to work outside at wages so low. A co-worker years ago was the son of a construction worker. One winter his father was on a job site in New York, within easy view of an office building. Some of the clerical staff in an office put up a sign in the window: "It's 70 Degrees In Here". The construction workers put up their own sign: "It's $X/hour Out Here", $X being considerably higher than the going wage for clerical workers.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  Wow those clerical workers are assholes.
  - floor2 5y ago
    Ya, these obviously fake class-warfare anecdotes are weird. People retell and repost them as if they were real, despite being obviously made up to show group X being bad/dumb/naive and group Y being good/smart/wise.
- RDaneel0livaw 5y ago
  that's exactly it. Of course there will be some people who turn their nose at outdoor construction work, but the much bigger reason is the pay is just not livable. In KY the average pay for a construction worker is $14 an hour. You can't buy a house or raise a family with that.
retrac 5y ago
From what I can tell of labour history, 1921 would actually be /after/ most of the increases in labour safety and labour standards. The gap between 1871 and 1921 on that one is probably bigger than 1921 and 2021. The 48 or 40 hour week was long established by 1921 while 80 hr was standard in the early industrial revolution. American life expectancy also increased about 20 years or so in the years leading up to the 1920s.

nwah1 5y ago

One of the things that comes to mind about why it is so hard to measure things in this industry is that almost nothing is commodified, and the commodities and specifications are all at the component level, which vary wildly over time. If you want to measure the productivity of steel production over time, you can get a reliable measure of what the prices were in 1979 and what they are today. A "house" or a "building" is not a commodity, though. There are prefab structures which are more commodity-like, but they are the exception, not the rule. And then to top it all off, the costs of acquisition differ wildly depending upon where you are. Land values are hard to filter out in the reported data. Labor issues are different based on where you are. Etc. In the recreational vehicle industry, there are different classes of vehicles. Things are pretty standardized. You can get a rough sense of improvements or regressions over time, in terms of both price and quality. A class A vehicle is not the same as a class C vehicle. You can track fuel efficiency over time. And the factories are fixed in location, and there is no locational value to filter out. There is no such official classification system for homes. We have informal names for the various styles of homes, but they have no formalized meanings or reliable reporting. But in a world where prefab construction became commonplace, this may be another matter. And if construction took on this form, arguably the quality over time could improve. Why is automotive glass so much better than the glass we use in residential windows? Why is the attention to detail so much better in cars than in homes? I'm sure the annual tax penalty on buildings doesn't help... something vehicle owners don't have to deal with. And I'm sure the rampant speculation in land doesn't help either. Both could be improved by shifting taxes off of buildings and onto land. But of course, prefab construction is outright illegal in much of the US.

MAGZine 5y ago

I worked at PlanGrid for five or so years, and these sad looking graphs are really what inspired a lot of my colleagues. Even if the data is fuzzy, the directionality says a lot. Construction is hard, and it's getting harder. New code and regulation is hard. The contractor/subcontractor relationship is hard, and it produces a lot of bad anti-patterns in "cover your ass," or doing things that are just plain wrong, but are what was written down. Perhaps worst is that the tools have only marginally improved. A hammer is still a hammer, and a nailgun is still a nailgun. Hanging drywall doesn't go faster than it did 30 years ago really. Though, as homes/buildings get more complicated, it only serves to need more specialists, more cooks in the kitchen, and slower results. Heck, just look at the cost to build a mile of highway. And that's a relatively simple construction. Yet when you look at what goes into it, all of the people involved, all of the engineering that goes into it, and all of the fixtures that are required to "finish," a road to a modern standard, it's expensive. Construction is one area where there just really is little replacement for hard work.

someguydave 5y ago
Even worse, construction is hard work with heavy, low cost and bulky things. The “logistics revolution” in retail therefore can do little to help.
letitbeirie 5y ago
> to a modern standard We let perfect be the enemy of good a lot here. Environmental regs, construction standards, and the ADA bring a lot of benefits but they've made it so there's so such thing as a minor project anymore.
- MAGZine 5y ago
  Sort of... there's still a lot of horse trading that goes on in getting things approved for build. sometimes they build things that aren't perfectly specced, but are acceptable, especially if you're willing to go above and beyond in other areas which might be easier for you to accomplish. but yes, overall, codes become more complicated and it gets harder to build. the quality is better, but it is slower. one of my old coworkers started a startup to help people navigate codes faster and understand the specifications, which in of itself can be a hindrance wrt the permitting process (though that's only one part of construction).

Certified 5y ago

I do not find it surprising that when you stop teaching new generations how to make things, manufacturing productivity gets worse. In the Texas school district I attended, all the vocational and shop classes were eliminated in the mid-90s to make budget for the creation of Cisco networking certification classes that were canned less than 10 years later. This re-budgeting was going on in school districts across America. High school shop after high school shop sold machine tools that they had taught kids on since the 60s and 70s at pennies on the dollar. 10-20 years later when parents started demanding vocational classes back, the school districts realized that modern machine tools are too expensive to get back into schools unless they can pass multi-million dollar bonds. Generally, only the best funded schools in the best run districts have had good enough organization and motivation to make these bonds happen since. As a result, you get one or two specialty shop classes at a single magnet high school in well-funded school districts, but they are few and far between. This was just my n=1 experience and perspective in my particular corner of the world. I would love to hear if other students or faculty from those eras had similar or dissimilar experiences.