Employees are not robots. They are human beings. Sometimes human beings have human problems that need the assistance of other humans. This makes humans happier and more productive.
It's depressing to think that there are people who actually believe that optimal use of work resources is even worth calling out as an issue. In 2024.
If you want your employees able to deal with emergencies, you can't run them at 100% capacity all the time. You need some slack, so you have capacity when shit hits the fan.
Using a small amount of that slack to keep another employee happy can be a good investment. In addition, it's good for someone like the CISO to poke around the innards of your network (etc) configs from time to time, just to stay up to date with what's going on in the company and to perhaps flag anything that smells suspicious.
You can do these kinds of exploration exercises completely free form, or you can take a little task like 'figure out exactly why this specific site is blocked' as a token of motivation.
I agree that all of this mostly only makes sense, if it doesn't take too much time.
Though if this specific task would take a lot of time, that would also indicate that either the CISO needs to upskill, or the network config is too complicated. In either case, that would be a valuable insight.
> Wait, so you begged your CISO to figure out why your work internet ecosystem was blocking your personal project website from work computers? Man that sounds like a horrible waste of the CISOs time and not what work resources are for.
Sticking to your strict productivity line of thought, this kind of ask would:
1) be a great small teaching task for an intern, and
2) build goodwill elsewhere in a company, something good CISOs won't pass up an opportunity to do when the cost is relatively cheap.
But it's also likely that the CISO just wanted to help.
