Google employs a non-trivial number of former university faculty as engineers...

And a nontrivial number of current university faculty.

(Fei-Fei Li recently left, as a notable example, and I can name 3-4 profs from my alma mater who are also employed at Google in various capacities)

Indeed, and even stranger arrangements. I know one professor who comes to work for us every summer (with hilarious HR boundary condition consequences every year).

And I’m sure this is true of any large university with a competitive computer science program.

why? university faculty isn’t all that impressive? they are usually just people who made the choice to stay in school longer while others wanted to do something useful right away. many google engineers are phds. but once again this doesn’t mean anything