The evaluation system at Amazon drives a culture where most white collar staff won't be there 2 to 3 years from now and they realize they are in a stressful meatgrinder just around the time they start to gain a working knowledge of the project they have been assigned to.

It's not often the employees fault that they leave for greener pastures or are Pivot'ed out of Amazon, they usually work 3+ years at software firms before/after Amazon. Amazon would rather light money on fire by paying to recruit talent, give them half a year to start being positively impactful, then turn up the heat in the year or so thereafter until the employee is gone, rather than treat their workforce decently.

Acting like a garbage employer is sapping Amazon of talent, slowing down projects and burning tons of money on talent. Focus more on team building exercises, invest in actual mentoring if your employees, stop pressuring managers to rank and Pivot employees needlessly and Amazon can stop letting talented people slip out of the organization.

It goes deeper than just the evaluation system. It's that Amazon is the definition of "process over people". To the point where the people are seen as fungible, interchangeable, and easily replaced.

The evaluation system is just the logical outcome of the much deeper culture that drives the company.

The evaluation system does not exist on it's own. People run and maintain that system even it it appears as a naturalistic set of immutable rules to most subject to it without being able to influence a change.