They may have been extremely competent at this, but if they decided to spend years of their relatively short ephemeral life on such a useless project, perhaps they weren’t the best at the time. Perhaps they needed money and were focusing on family life, I don’t know. Who I am to judge? I’m judging though.
Why is that useless as opposed to what most of us do for work? I think you guys have a weird sense of how useful the average job is, or how much the average job contributes to society at large. At least this made a lot of money I guess.
They can take the skill to any other employer and improve performance for others elsewhere. Think of all the seconds you could get back to do more meaningful things if more websites were fully optimized. It may sound silly but it snowballs into minutes, hours, and days.
I think most jobs contribute positively to the society. Not much, for sure, but they contribute.
Is the cleaner regularly removing poop stains from the personal toilet of a big and rich Google shareholder more useful than the qualified Google engineer working hard so a big number is very slightly bigger on one the shareholder’s list of numbers? I think the cleaner has more impact.
Before tech became the go-to big money job, there was a well-worn stereotype of electrical engineering grads going to Wall Street instead of an EE-centric job.
a) don't care
b) were desperate enough at the time, then, like that damn videogame, it sucked him in
it's too easy to get carried away by sheer technical complexity of optimization tasks, even if you are optimizing for bad.