I have worked at a subsidiary, and other companies worse than Amazon. Imagine if, instead of annual reviews are required to put 5% at the bottom of a stack rank and then "manage them out", you have quarterly stack ranks, where everyone knows who is in the ranking pool, and with two bad quarters you are out, even if it was just the luck of the draw, because management had to dump on someone.

Stack ranking, plus rank and yank, absolutely destroys collaboration and teamwork. You can cram people into an open plan to "force" people to collaborate, but if you stack rank it will have no effect. You'll still end up with some pretty savage competition, up to and including being unwilling to help coworkers, unwilling to do anything for another team that is in the same stack rank pool, and some serious bragging and brown-nosing to have "visible" accomplishments (even if you have to steal them from your teammates.)

The whole "rank and yank" thing needs to die in a fire, IMO. It's seriously abusive, and counterproductive in the long term, especially if you consider tribal knowledge and business improvements.

> The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless.

Stack ranking is one thing, but you're against performance reviews? How do you know if you're doing well or poorly in your job? Or does it not matter because firing is so difficult?