I studied at the Department of Parallel Computing, taught parallel programming, and also spent 12 years building distributed systems. Therefore, many facts about parallelizing work have not only become intuitively clear but have also found many applications in everyday life. For example, I like Amdahl’s Law and its implications.
If the cores can execute 100% of the code in parallel, such a beautifully written program can be run on any number of cores. The more cores, the faster. It all makes sense; Bitcoin miners work precisely because of this.
If the cores can execute 90% of the code in parallel, on 32 cores it will already be noticeable that the benefit from them is not much greater than from 16 cores. And in general, by adding cores, the program can be sped up by a maximum of 10 times.
Similar graphs can be drawn for teams. Let’s say each team member spends an hour a day in common meetings. According to Amdahl’s Law, if a team has 10 people and 1/8 of their work is not parallelizable, they will work like 4.8 independent people. If the same team is increased to 20 people, they will work like 6.1 people. That is, the headcount is 100% larger, but the work progresses only 26% faster.
It’s good when managers understand this math and act on it. This means they train and organize people so they can do their work independently together.