I've received this article from multiple people. Not the most accurate, and the tone is a little weird. The article makes it sound like a bad thing to toss a bunch of devs into working conditions so terrible that most of them quit. I disagree with that tone. The programmer I am today was forged in the fire of horrific 3am on call events, tense design discussions, vicious inter-team battles, and working a shit ton of hours on a system of enormous scale where mistakes cost millions of dollars. And I made one of those mistakes: I brought down digital in Europe for 11 hours. I had a lot of silly, egotistical notions about being a professional software developer that needed to go away, and Amazon forced me to grow up, fast. And it taught me politics. I went from the kind of person a manager actively sabatoges, to the kind who has two managers break the rules to keep him on the team. Still a lot of things to learn in all of those areas (e.g. I don't have much experience managing up when it comes to my skip level), but Amazon gave me a huge boost.
So again, Amazon IS a shitty place to work, but that's not a bad thing.
I am writing this post because some fuckwit on Linked In is going around saying "hey even though i'm not a real dev and only been at amazon for 18 months I can tell you everything is cool; NYT is lying."
I just want you all to know, he's full of shit.
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