It's not the generalization pitfall, but a completely wrong metric. "Hours spent" is an expense, not a revenue. If you were measuring machines by KWh spent, you'd never have an insight to optimize that number down instead of up.
Lawyers are often billed by hour, but that's not what they are paid for. You will quickly lose customers if you optimize for that metric. Instead, if you figure out how to spend less hours for the same results, you may charge even more per hour, because you are saving your customers' time, plus handle more customers over a given time frame.
But as with lawyers, programmers, managers and all other non-machine-like workers produce "customer happiness" that's not easily measured, other than at the level of overall competitiveness of the firm.
Lawyers are often billed by hour, but that's not what they are paid for. You will quickly lose customers if you optimize for that metric. Instead, if you figure out how to spend less hours for the same results, you may charge even more per hour, because you are saving your customers' time, plus handle more customers over a given time frame.
But as with lawyers, programmers, managers and all other non-machine-like workers produce "customer happiness" that's not easily measured, other than at the level of overall competitiveness of the firm.