Wrt "people standing around", software is the same. You look at what it takes to ship a one-line change in any nontrivial, well-engineered website or app, compa

Wrt "people standing around", software is the same. You look at what it takes to ship a one-line change in any nontrivial, well-engineered website or app, compare the textual code change with all the work that goes in waiting for the compiler, code review, writing and running unit tests, integration tests, running release QA tests, testing in prod, and final release, and you got a lot of apparent overhead "waiting around". One difference is perhaps that the work is more amenable to automation and adding machines to replace humans, but even that (as in construction) has its limits.