It must be a fine line to walk between finding hyper-intelligent people, meeting their intense need for self actualization, and mostly employing them in the soul numbing work of selling ads.
This criticism -- that genius is being wasted on "soul numbing" ad work -- strikes me as an inaccurate cheap shot. First, because most of the brain power at Google isn't devoted to the ad systems, but to the services that attract an audience. Don't you think their most "hyper-intelligent people" are engaged in the constant and noble battle to continue improving search, for an ever-changing internet and against the ef…
There is no doubt the ad system is valuable. There is no doubt that creating the advertising systems google uses would be an intellectual challenge. But people don't want to see ads. This work is mostly the work of deciding how to best trick people into being distracted by text they don't want to see in the first place.
The better the ad people do their jobs, the worse off most people are for it. This is the basis for the work being soul numbing.
Conversely, on what basis would working on google's ads be the kind of soul affirming work you look back happily on as you cough up blood while you're dying 50 years from now?
Then the googlers can look at all the stuff someone like Ludwig Mies or Steve Reich or Jonathan Ive comes out with. I am sure that google has a huge amount of talent that would be capable of creating at this level (the peak of human potential), and they don't produce much at this level.