But it wasn't really 'good' journalism. Counter points from Amazon employees were compelling and raised good objections.

I think NYTimes is worried about losing its entirely unearned special social perch in context of distribution channels and e-markets.

It really was good journalism, by all acceptable definitions of that term. Just because a number of engineers report never being treated that way, that doesn't negate the hundreds of data points that the Times used in the piece, which were all approved by Amazon ahead of time.

I've heard the Times interviewed hundreds of people. NOT that the hundreds of people all said the same thing. Unless you have some confirmation of that, I suspect the quotes in the article are the result of cherry-picking.

That's not how newspaper editing works. No one is going to prove to you the editor's logic that went into selecting those interviews and that they are indeed representative (how could you ever fully quantify that?), but to suggest otherwise means that you're doubting every article ever published by any newspaper.

Well, most press about things I have direct experience with is either outright wrong or extremely misleading, so how can I trust the press on things I don't have direct experience with? I'm not sure doubting every article ever published by any newspaper is such a bad idea.

I'll take my own experience working at Amazon for 2 years and knowing dozens of hundreds of Amazon employees over blind faith in the Times's editors.

I think one of the big lessons of this experience is that there isn't such a thing as a unified Amazon culture and experience, since there are so many and numerous experiences to the contrary. You can look at the hundreds of negative reviews posted on this site and anonymous gists published to see that this really is across groups and not present in a mere dozen of cherry-picked articles by the Times. My own interviewing experiences have been fairly negative as well and the burnout and long working hours stories that I've seen published by other software engineers are in line with my friends' experiences working for AWS. Your mileage obviously varies.