Even more to add is that the article is more or less fresh and at Amazon's scale i doubt any major changes had undergone in the last 10 months.
His profile says "Architect and cofounder of Simple Email Service. Creator of Cloud Desktop, a cloud-based development environment used by most Amazon engineers. Technical lead for Amazon's strategy for using AWS."
Can't get more "From the horse's mouth than that"
We are generally asked not to comment on stuff like this because of how easy it is to reveal confidential internal details.
For the record, the article is mostly wildly out of date, but others have already corrected the record.
Moreover, if you inspect the person's comments you will notice how "legally" clean they are. Even the phrasing looks the same for both comments "based on my experience", "this information if wrongful" etc. Looks like those were refined by the legal team before posted.
I wonder all that, because since my first engagement with AWS and Amazon recruiting around five years ago the engineering tone did not change. That concerns in a way that putting an effort to get a job there may turn out a major disappointment.
The cutthroat approach is nice sometimes as it adds the taste of competition but the whole noise seems like you're about to get buried rather than played or burned out.
If it's a liability to say nasty stuff about the employer and most of the ex-ones throw some heat the nearest possible conclusion is that the truth tends to bow to statements that are observed as outdated and controversial by present employees.
It just can't be a smear campaign against just that one company.
It might seem draconian, but it makes a lot of sense. Talking about a smaller company in a forum like HN might be completely anodyne, but comments about Amazon could easily have repercussions like getting picked up by the press and spun into some crazy story, or alerting people to some strategic information that the commenter isn't even aware is sensitive. For example, posting "hey we're at Amazon and we're moving from system X to system Y" could generate surprised and angry phone calls with the CEO of the vendor of X (I have a real example in mind that happened because of a stackoverflow post), or could cause the stock price of the vendor of Y to jump, causing insider trading concerns... best to just avoid it.
So it's very natural that company policy would strongly discourage such public commentary, and most current employees follow that.
Didn't NY Times expose help to shape Amazon workplace for good?