The best engineer I've ever known ended up working for years on optimizing ad space auction time by micro seconds.
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.
That is really sad.
they either:
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.