Many years ago I worked at a “dot com startup” (they’ve no longer around). I worked in the engineering side. Years in, the company was growing and we had lots of new people working there.

Several of us would stay at our desks during lunch, and play multiplayer games on the network (IT didn’t mind). It was a nice way to blow off work stress.

Our customer support reps would often come up to ask us questions on how to handle a customer issue…and we would always jump out of the game to help them (despite being on our lunch break). We also made sure to keep our lunch gaming to exactly our lunch time. No overage.

Some employee complained to our boss, about us playing games “during work time”. Our boss talked to us and told us we had to stop. We explained that it was only during lunch, we had ITs approval, and we would stop playing anytime someone needed something…despite working during our break.

He never had our backs, and refused to talk to the complainer.

Okay. Fine. We’ll quit playing during lunch.

From then on, engineering always took their lunch off-site. Customer support began bringing up issues that they couldn’t get anyone, and that they had to make customers wait and call them back…extending customer support resolution times.

They stayed leaving for lunch well after I left.

tl;dr - company was getting free labor but pissed it away because manager had no intelligence or backbone.