The value of this is multi-faceted. It shows technical validation by trusted engineering talent. Those engineers are able to expend their own political capital on the project. Those engineers have demonstrated an ability to navigate corporate hierarchy and deliver large-scale projects. One of the key requirements of higher levels of promotion is that you are focusing on strategic goals for the companies rather than strictly complex/important technical products.
Having interesting & exciting conversations is nothing. Everyone is smart & happy to nerd out about complex and interesting abstract concepts/designs. Doesn't mean that they think those ideas are worth pursuing or that they're worth pursuing right now.
On other side engineer guys good to finish product, learn many half-assd tools and tacking different set of problems every day. This builds good intuition. But most of time they lack concept and they berate academics (at least in their early career days)
Now this is not universally applicable to everyone and may be wrong. I have seen some good people who rock both worlds.
OK, so I had hoped that this was a problem unique to Google but I guess its not.
I just don't get this kind of thinking. I understand that a PhD is a good marker for intelligence... but not for ingenuity (maybe a tiny bit). I've worked with both PhD's and non PhD's... while PhD's are amazing to talk through different ideas, what may or may not work, the people I was most productive with have universally been people who get excited about technology (not saying they're mutually exclusive). Mind, not excited about fads, but those who can't wait to code a prototype to see if it really works as expected. Those who will jump in the middle of an outage and are excited to learn about what might have gone wrong.
Those are the attributes that I now look for whenever I have to make a choice between teams, between companies, whatever. The people that get excited by new designs and architectures, who love to talk through them, are the best people to work with.
I guess I do understand why Google is that way... I just hope that this kind of thinking doesn't infect other workplaces.