Amazon has particular contempt. It's not limited to the floor workers; engineers get punted if they look like they may be more short-term trouble than they're worth. Contrast with a company like Google, that goes out of its way to hire the best they can and then retain them under the belief that an engineer invested in pays dividends down the road.

Steve Yegge's accidentally-published blog post isn't the whole story, but it has a ring of truth to it.

https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611