As someone who has seen stack ranking in action at Amazon and Microsoft both, this is an excellent interview question at any company you consider, especially one founded by ex-Amazon or ex-Microsoft employees. Do you use stack ranking? If the answer is yes then you know they aren't performance based.

Microsoft and Amazon both seem to think it is "scientific". It isn't really scientific when, in advance, you decide that %10 should be on a firing track, %70 should be warned and %20 should be promoted-- without regard to actual performance.

Bezos likes to run around claiming he only hires "A players", but what it ended up being was C & D[1] players who didn't know how to program or understand technology, ranking their teams, almost completely based on office politics[2] and ones ability to hype their work, rather than the actual technical quality of the work. Of course generalizations like this will have exceptions and I knew some groups who were lead by software developers who got promoted, and the AWS group seemed to be insulated from the amazon culture. But HR and Management at Amazon.com were absolutely atrocious. And that's in comparison to Microsoft (where I also worked) where this "metrics" religion was completely accepted as well.

If you're a talented engineer, work for a startup, but if you need a big company and you're in the northwest, pick Microsoft before you pick Amazon. (Maybe google is better than both, but I've not worked there.)

Edit to add:

In fairness I can compare myself to gates. I saw the Kindle at Amazon about a year(?) before it was announced and wanted to kill it on the spot. (not that I had any say in the matter) I thought it looked like it was designed in the USSR. Still do, but bad design can still make for a good product financially (and it has gotten better.)

[1] I'm being generous here. My boss and my bosses's boss and all the HR people I'd give an F. Absolutely the most incompetent people I've worked with in 20 years of mostly working with startups where even really competent people have to struggle with immense difficulties and uncertainty, neither of which was present at Amazon, except to the extent created by incompetence, though this incompetence went all the way to the top. I saw other people leading other teams who were C & D players, so I presume my team was just particularly bad.

[2] (Talking about amazon here, saw much less of this at MSFT. MSFT was more misguided than... evil.) In order of decreasing effectiveness: Kissing Bezos's ass, Kissing your manager's bosses ass, kissing your manager's ass, kissing your manager's peers ass, making up initiatives that sounded really effective, even if they had no actual effect and then propagandizing them around the company, sabotaging your co-workers products, knifing your co-workers in the back verbally, deliberately mistranslating instructions from your boss to others in the team, hyping yourself with other teams, conspiring with others at other teams, and just generally lying. I saw all of this occur. If I'm bitter it is because I was not smart enough to accept that this was the companies culture, and I gave them way too much benefit of the doubt. I should have left immediately after they broke a hiring promise to me (in the first month.)