"But that's not how it is on my team!" is the dumbest and yet most common response you hear from Amazon employees when they hear about Amazon's horrible business practices. The whole company is in fact a team. You are part of the exact same team.
My main message was that NO - that's not how it is ANYWHERE at the company. Connections data isn't available to managers de-anonymized. Period. On any team.
This post also has nothing to do with Amazon's business practices, but rather HR practices with employees.
Lastly, yes, there are some facets of what I wrote that are about my team. But this is the case anywhere. Some teams have good manager. Some have bad ones. Good ones rise. Bad ones fall. That includes using the same tools and techniques for good or for evil.
I absolutely do see Amazon as one whole team. That's why I felt the need to comment to make people working on other teams not think that this poster is revealing some secret insider information, and new SDEs be scared thinking what is happening with their 'private survey' results.
The REASONS for why there is such a variability in process and culture between AMazon teams would need a whole other blog post, but the tl;dr is: The #1 focus of Amazon development teams is delivering results and getting things done. This is done by removing road blocks and incentivizing RADICAL autonomy on the teams - way more than is available at tech giants of comparable stature (whether Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft).
The upside of this is a tremendous sense of autonomy and responsibility offered to every engineer which is empowering and addictive.
The downside of this is that toxic managers can thrive temporarily and ruin good teams through misused autonomy. They do get weeded out, but it takes time. And good people can be lost along the way.
