I was a person who lived that nightmare. I was hired by Amazon as a senior team member to open a quick deploy fulfillment center in Southern CA.
During the first week of leadership training, I realized that their management principles and the way they ran the business were much different than what I had experienced at other corporations. When I asked about some of these policies that did not follow the norm and in fact violated or skirted federal regulations they responded we are not wrong, just peculiar in our procedures and policies.
When I joined Amazon I had over 30 years of corporates experience which is certainly not the norm because I soon realized that Amazon preferred to hire people right out of college so they could indoctrinate them in the way that Amazon does business.
I was on a team of six people and had six people reporting to me. My immediate boss was 26 and I was 53. My immediate boss was known as Little Hitler. He was the first person that told me this and he acted like he was proud of the nickname and I soon found out that he was a brutal boss that would fly off the handle at a moment's notice. If he was yelled at by his boss you were certain that he was going to go after someone on the team.
Every week there was a different report and a chance you would be called out because your team or department was not performing to the level they expected.
Any incident that occurred and there were many I was responsible for even though a manager may have placed the employee at risk or the employee was not properly trained before assigned a position.
Keep in mind that the majority of employees came off the couch and then were expected to work at a job that required standing at that station for oftentimes 10 hours. Some hourly employees would fake injuries just to rest in the clinic.
All hourly employees had to meet a daily quota which led to several terminations each week when they failed to meet the number.
When reviews came around you had to rank your team. as you described and often times the person on the bottom was terminated. On my team, the person on the bottom happened to be black and should have been terminated on the basis of poor performance however they feared he would file a discrimination lawsuit so they did not terminate him but the person right above him was terminated.
When I left Amazon there was only one Manager left from the original senior team at the Fulfillment Center. Upon leaving I felt like a huge load was lifted off my shoulders. The average life of an Amazon Manager is about 16 months.
It was the worst company I had ever worked for in my 30-year career.
