I'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our V

I'm an SDE, and I recently talked to my manager at amazon about this. I basically said "this isn't true for our org, right?" and was told that even though our VP has tried to get out of the system (there are some quotas that he didn't go into detail about) we are stuck in the system and the result is that over the entire org, people are stack ranked (or something similar to stack ranking but not explicitly called "stack ranking" and if, for example, he was able to make the case that his direct reports were all doing well and improving, then inevitably other teams in the org would somehow be forced to have more low ranked individuals. I don't know how these things are enforced but there you have it. He also mentioned that someone explicitly said that the way to think about it is to "stack rank individuals in your head". Pretty blatant and it seems to be very much built in to the system.