The story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all those managers from both echo and phone project. Better kick some more engineers off the life raft.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hardware-division-layo...

They have a real 'slaughter the goose that layed the golden egg because holy shit! there is a huge expensive golden egg and it's mine all mine, die, die, die..." culture. Bezos probably has an employee purge button built into his desk.