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.