It’s not as strict as you are trying to make it out to be. My favorite job ever was a small company. The owner was fine with us programmers just working on pet projects on company time. I was goofing around at some point and ended up writing us some code that ended up being kind of a workshop for some code that us programmers would have to sit and work on. It allowed non-programmers to set up the same conditions and handled the ‘code’ part internally. It was all because I was just goofing around with program ideas and eventually got to that point where I had my eureka moment. I didn’t set out to waste company time and money, but the end result paid off in droves, which is exactly how it sounds like the deck came to be. Another programmers goofy side project turned into an accounting package that we ended up tying into our actual product. If our boss/owner had been looking at it the way you are describing, none of that would have come to fruition, but look at all the money he would have saved not letting us programmers do what we did. /s
This person is an idiot and can only think of one possibility. They are ignoring the fact that fucking around on the job can have implications like increasing skills. I made the mistake of replying to this person with an anecdote of mine which I am sure will be deconstructed by them like they were there. Point is, boss allowed us to goof off with pet programming projects and that resulted in me experimenting with code I wouldn’t have had the chance to otherwise and making a breakthrough, which I then realized how to implement for the benefit of said company. So I wasn’t fucking around to make money, but the fucking around gave me the knowledge and skills to them apply that indirectly. But hey this person is determined to infect the thread with their single minded theory that doesn’t make a shit to the actual conversation.