Hot take: I watched three crews in Denver cut padding before the carpet and it's costing them hours.
They were laying out the pad, cutting it to the room shape, then trimming again when the carpet went down. I started cutting the pad about an inch inside the tack strip after the carpet is stretched and it saves a full roll of pad per house. How many of you still cut the pad first?
My old foreman in Phoenix swore by cutting pad first, said it kept the carpet from buckling. But we wasted so much material. Honestly, @the_evan, that extra hour adds up across a whole crew's schedule over a year.