My roommate works at a call center. There is a rule there that you can't go to the bathroom within 15 minutes of clocking in. He complains of the arbitrary control of people's bladders yet in the same breath will complain of people who go straight in at 9:15. To me that's where work culture gets despicable: make people look down at people who don't approve of rules they themselves don't like, and you've outsourced shame from managers to the employees themselves.
I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of Amazon's culture, but this person seems to place more concerns on bathroom culture than most. Yes, I prefer to be silent in the bathroom, but sometimes people talk and then I will respond. I've talked work in the bathroom before, including to a supervisor. Not everyone has the same expectations and in a large group it's inevitable that some folks are going to want to use coincidental meetings in the bathroom to have impromptu conversations about work or other topics. The idea of "hunting for the perfect bathroom" strikes me as a bit of an overreaction to such a situation.
"I regularly saw people bring their laptops into the bathroom, where they would sit on the toilet and write code"<p>I would need some corroboration in order to believe this bit. The rest of the behavior listed I've sadly seen in other companies, though I've fortunately never been somewhere it was a cultural constant, as opposed to the lack of tact of some individuals and double-digit tendency to hire folks who lacked tact.
I interned within AWS for a few month and never saw anyone carrying their laptops into bathrooms. Although I do remember regularly doing a linearly search of adjacent floor's bathrooms in order to find a seat.
I worked support for a major shipping company and was told I could not use the restroom without answering the phone while I was in there. I refused and nothing really ever happened.
It's called multi-tasking:<p><a href="http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26" rel="nofollow">http://dilbert.com/strip/2012-10-26</a>