It had to feel fucking amazing to be an engineer that was part of that at the time. To know (even if it was publicly unknown) that you were able to so massively destroy a record which still stands 4 years later.
1. As a programmer, you will feel most productive working on a project by yourself where you just pound out thousands of lines of code.
2. The secret to how you get 100x more done than any individual programmer can do is that you have 200 programmers working together feeling 50% productive.
3. Google has no interest in projects that can be accomplished by one brilliant engineer working by themselves.
It can be really unsatisfying for a programmer, because we all learn to program individually and that's what we base our "am I being productive?" feeling on, but it turns out that you can do some really amazing things if you're willing to put that aside and work together, even if it means spending half your day in meetings and checking email or writing design docs that no one reads.
And if you're feeling challenged, it's probably because you're doing something convoluted and even you won't remember how it works in six months and no one will be able to maintain it and you can actually get nearly equivalent performance out of three mapreduces and a drop-in machine learning model, so maybe you should just do that?
It's not for everyone, but at the end of the day would you rather feel productive and challenged, or actually change the world a little bit at a time?