Ken Thompson was brought on because he was Ken Thompson, and if you had the means, then not hiring him would be a strange thing to do. The amusing thing about that is that he never jumped through the new hire hoops (a language exam, or something) and therefore could not commit his own code.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/21/ken_thompson_take_o... (quote here but it's worth checking out the book)

I think Rob Pike half-heartedly mentions in a couple of the twilight videos introducing Go that Ken and he got together to conceptualize go after he walked into the office one day and got tired of a google server binary taking ~40 minutes to compile. Not sure if it this is the real reason, but it's a great story.

Me neither besides I think there is not a room for "yet another Java/C#/Replacement". You need to offer much more now days to convince people to switch.