Count the help-wanted ads on The Yard this week and a pattern jumps out: of 510 live job listings, 196 — nearly four in ten — were posted by government. Not contractors staffing up for public work. The agencies themselves, trying to hire the people who make public work move.

The Department of Design and Construction is carrying 86 of them — the single biggest employer on the board, public or private. That is the same agency whose capital book we sized at $43 billion this month, the city's builder-for-hire for libraries, firehouses, sewers and streetscapes. The gap between the book and the bench is the story.

DOT posts 35 openings. DEP, 14. Then comes the long tail that never makes anyone's news: Nassau County Public Works, the Suffolk County Water Authority, White Plains, Yonkers, Newburgh, Kingston, and four separate divisions of Orange County Public Works — all hunting the same civil engineers and inspectors as everyone else.

The engineering core is where it pinches. Of the 510 listings, 164 carry an engineering or estimating title, and 77 of those are public-sector. On the private side of the same board, Gilbane, Tutor Perini, LiRo and STO Building Group are running 29 to 58 openings apiece — the same resumes, the opposite side of the table.

Salary transparency says the quiet part out loud, because the public bands are printed on the listings. A junior engineer at DDC is offered $59,747 to $68,709. An Engineer-In-Charge tops out at $107,656. A DOT design engineer's band runs $66,330 to $99,528. Those numbers compete for the same degrees as the 314 private listings beside them.

Why this matters to a contractor: the vacancy behind the counter is the schedule risk nobody prices. The engineer who reviews your submittal, the inspector who signs off your pour, the analyst who moves your payment requisition — these listings are those desks. When the owner can't staff, jobs slow at exactly the choke points a contractor can't control.

And this is a floor, not a census. It counts only what agencies have posted publicly — not the lines quietly covered by consultants. LiRo and Dewberry, with 79 listings between them, sell into exactly that gap.

What to do with it: if you're hiring, know that you're bidding against the city for the same engineers — and the city just published its number. If you're one of the engineers, the postings are live on the agencies' own boards, and The Yard tracks them daily.