Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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