I think the point is that these concerns are largely orthogonal. Work (equiv. labor), is the time/effort that your employees are devoting to your business proce

I think the point is that these concerns are largely orthogonal. Work (equiv. labor), is the time/effort that your employees are devoting to your business processes. That work can be more or less productive as you say, or some part of the work could be devoted to making other kinds of work more productive. However it happens to be apportioned, there is some amount of time/effort that that work will take. The questions discussed in the essay are not about how to decide how to apportion the work. Instead, it's about issues that arise from coordinating that (predetermined amount of) work among N workers in a company. That's where you can have e.g. contention for shared resources or critical sequential segments. What you're saying is like looking at Amdahl's law (mentioned in the essay) and saying "WTF? This is a bad way to think about parallelism, because what if I could just come up with a better algorithm?" Amdahl's law is not about choosing the right algorithm, it's about how much time you can save by parallelizing the algorithm you have. Clearly choosing the right algorithm is important, but it is a different kind of question.