Well it dilutes a conversation when someone implies a senior Google employee is surely to be expected to be at the tier of disrupting entire markets in order to get and keep their job.

If that is what really what defines an L9 job at Google I think we'd all have been praising the typical L9 Google employees on HN long ago. And we'd all be justified in being angry Google decided to fire such a person.

Or maybe Google should pay their salary indefinitely because they were capable of disrupting a market at some point in the past? Or maybe yes, such a person needs to work at Google type company so all of us can benefit from the optimal situation from which to maximize their talent, even though such a company would let them go. Otherwise we'd all lose out on such a person being capable of contributing to the world if Google lays them off.

What else could they do then without a company who doesn't appreciate them keeping them on?

I’m not sure what exactly is a L9 at Google, but this looks a lot like research positions in many huge companies.

For instance there was researchers on voice recognition at Yahoo! way before the voice assistants became a product, and if I could imagine one of them bring up a well working model 6 months before the competition, and have a voice assistant hit the market.

It would disrupt an entire market.

But they’re not alone of course, and I don’t know how many other researchers are on the payroll trying to breakthrough other fields. All of them have a “disrupt the entire market” expectation I think, and of course their employer is also expected to give them enough time and leeway to make progress. They probably bring small improvement on existing things, and the number of papers published every year could be another measure as a temporizing strategy. But their actual stated goal is probably very ambitious and they’d be failing at it for a very long time.

Vint Cerf

Not really sure what you're trying to say, but Vint Cerf is a VP (i.e. L10).

Research is a career path, not a level.

As levels go up, each new level is a new job.

In the SWE track:

L3 is a new graduate

L4 is mid level (an engineer who you can generally trust to complete the tasks they're assigned)

L5 is Senior (who owns/shapes the direction of the team)

L6 is Staff (who has to see upcoming problems and shape efforts across the organization)

L7 shapes a product

L8 shapes a division

L9 shapes an industry

The expectations are sky high, but so are the comp. If you want to get millions, you'd better do something worth millions.

Huh. So L7-L9 are L3s that are good at marketing and slap the Google badge on everything they do?

Well, I guess that explains both why they fire them and why golang.org became go.dev.

From your ranking, L9 seems to not depend on the company anymore, looks more research. You cannot expect to shape/redefine industry every year, that's absurd. By this model every math/physics/chemistry research teacher should be fired every year.

And to be honest I don't think google has these expectations. Most probably he was was fired for different reasons, not performance

Research is theoretical. These roles are very much practical. These are the kind of people who drive partnerships across companies, lead important industry standards, and come up with ideas for entire new markets and products.

This is not a job everyone wants or is capable of doing. There are a very limited number of such positions, and those who want them must justify the position's existence.

I can't speak for Google, and Amazon doesn't have an L9, so our Distinguished Engineers are L10.

But a decent bunch of them are the types of folks to have wikipedia pages:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Roskind

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Bray (not anymore I guess)

The ones that don't probably would if it was public about how much of a significant contribution they've made to some foundational AWS services everyone knows. I think they don't mind.

Do they "redefine the industry" every cycle?