Do big companies like Google and Amazon fire developers for buggy releases?

Not going to answer for Google, but my company, which I assume has a philosophy pretty similar to Google, will typically not fire developers for buggy releases, but not for the crappy reasons mentioned in the OP.

The general idea is that:

- everybody writes buggy code, once in a while – living under the pressure of being fired for an error that anybody could have made is not conductive to innovation and experiments;

- if you have released a piece of software with a bug, you're now expected to fix it or help fix it and make sure that it never happens again to you or anyone else – not run away and update your resume;

- both learning about the bug and fixing it are learning experiences – at this stage, the company has already (involuntarily) paid for you to get this experience, so fire the person who is now the most knowledgeable about a problem?

I seriously doubt any successful software company is firing engineers for introducing bugs. They'd have no employees.

> One Google engineer from back then says the most remarkable thing about the co-founders' code was that when it broke, users would see funny error message: "Whoa, horsey!"

I'm always wary of stories such as this one. Everytime I encountered people complaining they were doing everything by the book while that one guy/gal over there gets all the credit doing mediocre work, there were more variables involved. Maybe H is a close friend and S has a bitchy resting face the author can't get past, or maybe H takes so long polishing his/her code and understanding business requirements that management never trust him/her with bigger tasks, while S gets the proverbial thing done fast and good enough for the business meeting next week. Don't get me wrong, I love me some beautiful and tested code that works well, but it takes time, and sometimes time is imperative when you care about money, and in a business setting, that's always.

I have never seen any case of a developer holding the project to ransom in order to fix a bug, as alluded to in the article.

That said the key point that those who are always firefighting and ‘saving the day’ do often get the recognition as opposed to the people who squat the bugs early, follow sane processes and test their own stuff well is true.

But the question is about tech companies (not outsourcing shops like in the top response I saw). And I think the answer is a simple no.

It's Quora. They pretend to discourage answers with such a low weight-to-usefulness ratio, but in reality those are highly rewarded - not only by the users with upvotes, but by Quora themselves by promoting those answers even in excess of their upvote count and awarding the authors Top Writer status etc. It's the way things are done there, and it's why (despite having been a Top Writer myself for two years in a row) I left.