I've been working as a software engineer at Google for about three years.
This is absolutely not the case, at least with my experience on my particular project. I feel like I am treated well, and we're not stack-ranked in any way that I'm aware of. My manager exercises discretion with letting people into the project and almost everyone I work with makes decent progress adding new code to the project and the code is of decent quality with relatively few problems in production. I feel privileged to work with the people around me for 40 hours each week at this point in my life.
I know this is pretty much a vague anecdote but I'd be happy to answer any questions or explain further.