They took some of the best brains, spoiled them with high salaries and glory and took their best years to make them work on dumb problems and projects that were cancelled at various stages of their life.
Those best brains did produce lots of interesting things, back in the day (not recently). The Google search algorithm, the ads auctioning system, Gmail, Golang, certain parts of Google Cloud like BigQuery (create relational tables, just stuff data in there, just scales by itself without "provisioning", write SQL queries including joins e.g. over hundreds of billions of rows...)
