I worked at Amazon for three years, 2010-2013. My experience was better than most of my coworkers', but I watched a lot of people including some friends go through exactly what is described in the NYTimes article. There's an old team that I'll see about once a year at somebody's house. People tell me that our conversations sound like we all have PTSD from our time there.

I have a friend still at Amazon, on a particular Kindle team. I got him an interview there, and felt a lot of guilt about that for awhile. I've been relieved (and quite surprised) that he's still happy there; the team he describes is quite different from any team I worked on or saw first-hand.

You can find a place in the company that isn't totally insane. But most of the many Amazon folks I keep in contact with are either looking outside for different jobs, or switching teams rapidly to try to find something better.