If you get PIPed at amazon, you can't transfer teams. It locks you to your current team until you "improve"

I wonder what the logic there is. If someone isn't doing well on a team, shuffling them to a new project might help. But the downside is managers might be annoyed by a new person on the team who is a suspected low-performer. Could lead to a game of hot-potato where people try to avoid having PIPs added to their team through politics.

The logic there is that this person was already going to leave your team either way, so if you PIP them they will just leave the company and you don't need to PIP someone else instead. Still a sociopathic thing to do though.

> they were already on the way out of the team, so why not use them to fill up the PIP quotas

Well, for starters, this LinkedIn post.