This isn't true. I've worked at Google for 13 years and have rarely seen someone fired for performance; it's certainly not automatic based on being at the botto

This isn't true. I've worked at Google for 13 years and have rarely seen someone fired for performance; it's certainly not automatic based on being at the bottom of a stack rank. Other companies have or had such a system [1] but Google never has. The sliver of truth is that Google's once-or-twice-yearly performance evaluation system asks colleagues to stack rank folks they are reviewing. I wish they'd get rid of it, but it's not used for much. It's only a partial order of folks they're reviewing, nothing really enforces that people actually do it, I suspect some people just rank all the people trying for promo this cycle above the people who aren't, and the many reviewers' stack ranks are never reconciled into one authoritative stack rank of the folks in a group. I don't know why it's still around. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve