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.
Well, I guess that explains both why they fire them and why golang.org became go.dev.
And to be honest I don't think google has these expectations. Most probably he was was fired for different reasons, not performance
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.
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.