This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She'd been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn't done anything useful

This happened to someone I bumped into on a Meetup group last year. She'd been hired by Google for a research project. She said she hadn't done anything useful for a year and was just there to put it on her CV and was suicidally bored. I bet she got laid off recently. Anyway it's not like it doesn't happen anywhere else. On two separate contracts I completed the work embarrassingly early and was paid to finish the contract and look busy so I didn't show the managers up or the staff on the team I was working on. We're talking really basic shit here like being hired to make a single web form that writes a row into a SQL table.