"Although there isn’t forced ranking in place, it does looks like Google one-upped Amazon in making it difficult to climb up their corporate ladder by having a

"Although there isn’t forced ranking in place, it does looks like Google one-upped Amazon in making it difficult to climb up their corporate ladder by having a promotion process based on pleasing everyone." This is not true. First, I think it's great that promotion-readiness is decided by an employee and not her manager(s). Second, when promotion packet is written, it gets reviewed by a promotion committee, most likely in another campus, and there is a very high likelihood that promotions are granted more objectively compared to the manager's peers (and up the chain, depending on a target level like it's done in Microsoft, long before peer feedback is written). Promotion committee decisions get reviewed and iterated to satisfy the promotion budget, and those lucky ones who meet the bar, get promoted. Sounds like a pretty fair system to me.