It did not work like that at Microsoft at all. Stack ranking happened at an organization-wide level, so the total pool was hundreds of employees. It was perfectly normal for one team to be full of high performers, and vice versa. And being ranked in the bottom bucket didn't mean you were going to be fired. In most cases it wouldn't even lead to a PIP. It was simply a lower bonus, that's it. I have no idea about Amazon but at Microsoft the whole manager having to fire 1 out of 5 employees every year was 100% a myth. I worked there for many years and out of many hundreds of coworkers maybe 2 or 3 were ever fired for underperforming (while it should have been way more).
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.
Funny enough the move away from stack ranking was very unpopular at Microsoft, since the performance review process became very opaque and way more political.