That’s exactly the point- Google in that time frame did a TON of prestige hiring, whether or not it made sense for the actual work they needed to fill.
That’s not what I got from the original comment.
How so? That was entirely the point
You’re not the origianl commenter so I don’t know how you divined that.
Building google _was_ research. It grew out of a PhD thesis. There are publicly available papers describing lots of the infrastructure innovations along the way (GFS, bigtable, mapreduce, borg, spanner, etc)
Take it up with the grandparent comment!!! I replied to the part about hiring PhDs to build web servers, with the strong implications that they were overqualified (or—misqualified) for the task!!!