Surely HR knows how long it takes to exit someone and if they wanted to keep the $200k they would have started the process earlier?
Is it just a big power play that keeps rolling in the expectation of bottomless/infinite talenent and pepetual inflow/attrition?
This has always been my interpretation. The "everybody is replaceable" mindset comes from Amazon retail warehouses, and bled into the rest of the company.
Some stakeholders latched onto the idea of churning some % of staff each year in an effort to, I guess, eventually filter the entire human population for the best possible employees.
Some people want to make it look like their HR team is doing a lot of useful stuff.
Some people want to boost their own department's metrics.
Some people want to work with a team to achieve actual business goals.
So they lined up potential candidates, made them the same deal and tested their level of docility and loyalty to himself. Some of the candidates demurred and they got the boot, the author played the loyalty game and then "backstabbed" his superior and screwed the stats.
So this is both a failure of the manager (it is their job to navigate the system and boost their reports during stack ranking), and also a failure of the system as a whole (this person probably shouldn't have been pipped).
I don't think it's so much doublethink as it is this manager is trying to balance competing interests in their very immediate sphere.
The manager made up reasons to place this person in the lowest rating, threatening w/ a PIP. Why? Perhaps to have a warning on file. Perhaps to try to persuade an even higher level of performance than what they'd previously considered excellent... who knows.
The manager being upset shows the PIP threat wasn't justified, as you noted. You don't get upset when a non-performer chooses to leave. Why would anyone continue to work under a manager that unjustly threatens them, or tries to motivate performance w/ fear? No, leaving was the right choice, even if they "won".
To me, it sounds like the manager is the one who really needs to go. Perhaps this really isn't Amazon policy at all, and this manager is being overly tyrannical and training his staff to be the same. We'll never know. On the other hand, Amazon never said what the "number of inaccuracies" were. It could very well be this tale is actually very close to policy too. Heck, it could be the actual policy exactly... zero IS a number after all.