Thanks, this made things clear. I was seriously considering joining until the responses in this thread. Its better to wait for another offer for few more months rather than suffering for the next 2-3 years.
I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).
In year 0-6, I would think the latter case comes up better, assuming (which is definitely true at like, all large tech companies) that yearly stock + 401k match (not even touching tax benefits) is better than 1/3 of your salary?
I would think stock + 401k > 1/3 salary basically (this was true for me at Workday, anyway)