I guess I thought this was common knowledge. I've stayed away from working at Amazon for a while now based on stories from other tech people I know. It's not a top-tier place to work outside of AWS and the opportunities aren't really that great either. Maybe the pay is good? I've heard it's not competitive even.

I know how it is though - people want the stamp of a top company on their resume. They also want to succeed.

I blame the husband just a tiny bit - for not saying 'no' earlier. Ironically, he might not have been fired if he put a line in the sand earlier. He probably did underperform because he wasn't managing the manager's expectations properly.

Of course, he might have gotten fired anyway - nobody will ever know.

Work is tough - and unfortunately companies like Amazon aren't "buffering the core" very well. These are engineers who might not be good at managing expectations or managing or leadership even - but why stress them out if they're otherwise super-useful to the company? Employees who can't handle this stress but are otherwise valuable should be cradled and they'll perform better for longer - pretty simple really.