The thing with those jobs where its like 1 guy operating the skid steer and six guys watching with arms folded, is those other six guys are just waiting their turn to do something specialized on the job. The skid steer work is the limiting factor, and that idle labor is worth paying to have on call on site essentially for when the specific needed task is done. To an extent for sure, but that is the idea of more specialized jobs. There isn't always enough work in front of you to have a specialist work 100% 24/7 like some CPU, but you want them around for when there is work for them to do.

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whatisthiseven 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is entirely caused by construction companies that take too many jobs and don't allocate sufficient equipment. They want to spread themselves and their equipment thin to have as many concurrent jobs as possible.

	▲	asdff 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I definitely see that too especially in jobs for homeowners where people might not know better to add time based penalties into contract. But you also see this in city work from city employees using city equipment where there is none of this contractor gamesmanship going on, only an ever increasing backlog of work from aging infrastructure and a municipal government disinterested in facing the music and paying for the associated increases in labor demand. Even with all the availability of equipment and labor on hand, sometimes you must wait for the excavator to do its job first before you can begin. You cannot weld a pipe together when there is still earth to clear and the pipe to be welded is sitting on the truck. You cannot parallelize all work, some is inherently serial.