Totally agree with this and wanted to add this point as well: "Least Effective" designation is often political.

Amazon claims to be data driven, so it assumes that a manager can stack rank their employees and select the lowest performer. But let's all be totally honest here, it's impossible to quantitatively rank employee performances. Any real attempt to do this results in Goodhart's law.

So either managers follow some quantitatve measurement (most CRs, least revisions, most stories done, etc) and ignore things that matter and can't be measured. Or they attempt some sort of qualitative measurement that almost always turns into who YOU (the manager) is most comfortable working with.

Stack ranking and cutting is a broken system that is inhuman. But it fits right in with Bezos' transactional mindset.

Internal culture, process and behavior is what decides if a job is stressful.. while at Amazon I worked fewer hours outside work hours but was a lot more stressed as every one around you is busy proving their worth than looking at what needs to get done collectively.

“ Sometimes a poorly performing team member was just a bad hiring choice. You politely let them go and work to improve your hiring process.”

This is what I don’t get! If you’re convinced a certain percentage of your people should be pushed out, then you don’t trust your recruiting team!

Maybe Amazons approach is to save money by hiring crappy recruiters, then fire the mishires.

My own experience is that Amazon recruiters are more salespeople than conventional recruiters.

But I can’t imagine organization repudiating a chunk of their workforce, and not asking “why do we keep getting so many crappy programmers.”