GPT is really a tool that draws trees without branches: they look like trees from distance, but fall apart upon some analysis. But I believe GPT will learn soon how to add decent branches.
This is how the so called sutras are written: a page of text gets compressed into one short sentence, so you have to stop after each of them and spend an hour unpacking its meaning, but the entire book is often just 200 sentences.
"Successful people" are those that come to the ocean shore, build a sand castle (indeed, what else is this sand for?), develop depression protecting it from wind, water and sun, and even force other tourists to build the castle for them. And they die wondering why the ocean shore is such a cruel and pointless place. Their lives aren't worthless,though: at least they develop some will. The wise don't build castles, they just watch the ocean and think about the relationship between sand, water, wind and sun.
There should be no usual analytical activity in your mind during that time. Meditation is a lot like watching a still thought with your mind. Beginners pick simple objects like a black triangle on white background and try to keep their mind completely still, but with eyes open, with no other thoughts for 5 mins. People here that do software can easily achieve photographic quality meditation on simple shapes like that triangle. Then you increase complexity and start choosing proper objects like a little Buddha shape. The added complexity makes meditation difficult: the 3d image (which is a reflection of the object) gets blurry, dim or the attention is outright dragged away by other thoughts. It's like trying to balance on one leg with strong unpredictable winds. The goal is to develop strength to balance the mind and properly reflect complex static objects.
Then you switch from objects to ideas and that's a lot harder, but that's the actual goal. For example, you think a lot about the nature or idea of software. Once you think you've found this idea, you sit and spend 5 mins meditating on this idea. Ideas can't be drawn, they don't have shapes and our mind is not really suited for dealing with ideas.
Meditation is addictive. Even at the early stages you'll notice the flow of something thru your body during meditation and the weird, but pleasant feeling of physically stretching out your brains. This addiction is considered an obstacle, so the usual advise is to do a few short sessions that stop once you start noticing that feeling.
Your daily thinking will become sharper as you progress, and you'll get this feeling of physical balance. If it's not the case, you're doing something wrong and you'd have to seek an in person advice.
One particularly dangerous mistake is trying to clear mind of thoughts and make it blank. Tsong-kha-pa wrote a good deal about this mistake in his books to warn people.
Meditation is prolonged concentration on something. Perhaps what you practiced was exactly "thinking about nothing and keeping your mind blank"? That would be the opposite of meditation and could be harmful, I guess. There are very subtle objects used in meditation, like light or space, but it's definitely not nothing.
The term "meditation" has such a fuzzy meaning these days. It really refers to prolonged concentration on something. We do this all the time. Yogis or occultists refine the term further into 3 stages: a brief concentration, a prolonged concentration (i.e. meditation) on something real and tangible like a symbol, and meditation on the idea behind that something real and tangible. Knowledge workers are very familiar with meditation, although they don't recognize it as a special activity. However that 3rd stage is unattainable for most people today: ideas are qualitatevily different. Mastering meditation on ideas switches mind into a special state. From that point directing mind at things like sun, moon, light or more abstract ideas like the relationship between space and sound produces significant effects or just summons ideas and thoughts about them. This is how great scientists make discoveries: they direct their mind at some topic and summon ideas about it (they don't produce ideas with induction or deduction) and then they materialise ideas into more tangible math.
Now we are talking. The thing is, only few work on those big projects. The rest are doing god knows what and have to jump ships often. If your resume says you spent 5 years maintaining a smallish noname project, your career is at risk. I don't believe that Google keeps all its 100k employees busy with complex and high impact projects.
That would be a career suicide to become a support engineer like this. 4 years later, when his stocks dry out, he'd have to switch the company and he'd need to tell a convincing story why the new company should pay him the new market rate. And "I supported legacy code" is not such a story. There's always an option to go to Microsoft and support legacy stuff for life, but beware that MS pays peanuts (relatively speaking) and with the MS pay you'd be priced out of the housing market.