I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture.
Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit".
No other Tech CEO has said that.
So perhaps your story is the anomaly?
We set extremely ambitious goals, and orgs are only expected to meet 70-80% of them.
It's an environment that indexes extremely high on autonomy and flexibility for each person and each team.
It is without a doubt a sink-or-swim environment. But, by and large, the ability to swim is based on individual merit.
Don’t Netflix also hire relatively many employees also? Perhaps I’m just misremembering. And wasn’t stack ranking and the like quite popular say 20 years ago? It isn’t obvious that the Google or Facebook of Apple or Amazon way is the best way to manage a business. Lots of people online have complaints about each.
And I’m not even particularly put off by your Jeff Bezos quote: it doesn’t need to be a bad thing for someone to have an incentive to quit something they are not suited to as they could then go on to something they are better suited to, and it’s true that a lot of people (even well-paid with alternatives) will spend a long time going to a job they dislike because it is easier to stay with the status quo than to leap.
I still feel like the hire-to-fire stories are directionally right (and so are eg stories about shipping new products being the only way to get promotions at Google leading to warped incentives)
To be fair there is a website dedicated to all the things killed by Google - https://killedbygoogle.com
No other tech co has a website like that, partly because it's incredibly difficult to get promoted at Google so you get a bunch of competing products that get spun up.
So I read this comment some time ago then scrolled quite far down the comments.
I have to report that there were very few people not expressing similar experiences than OP. It seems it is predominately resentment from people claiming to have worked for Amazon all the way down.
This place puts you in the middle of the ocean when you don't know how to swim. You either sink or swim.
That's not the metric for success or failure. It's delivering results.
But I wouldn't say it's a minute exception with so much of it being revealed. For every story that's revealed you can assume that there are others in a similar situation who do not publicly share their story.
Drama gets heavily upvoted.
If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had.
I'm one of those people.
I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, worked on a half dozen teams. Sure, there were outliers and a couple bad managers I've worked with, and some folks who left the company on bad terms.
But by and large, the experiences I had in 2 different countries on 2 different continents were mostly positive.
Yes, my job is tough. Yes, the oncall can be challenging sometimes too.
But I've also never stopped growing in the last decade, and have achieved bigger things than I ever thought possible.
Every single product and feature I've shipped have been immensely successful because of Amazon's deeply ingrained "Working backwards from the customer culture". And since that's what drives me - shipping cool stuff and having users on Twitter go crazy for it, I have never been more fulfilled.
Amazon is huge. There are now >60,000 Software Development Engineers worldwide. I'm not in Seattle but I'm in one of the largest offices outside of it.
So I'm sure every single horror story is true. But even so, they are a minute exception, and not most people's rule.