Jeff Bezos has written to staff about an article in the New York Times which suggested the working environment at Amazon was toxic. His email seems very straight-forward with the quote below being particularly compelling. If Amazon were as characterised, this would be a very odd thing to write.

Which leads to the question of whether the article was a hatchet job.

This seems quite likely, Amazon are aggressive in their pricing and are certainly a key player in the disruption of the publishing industry so for a couple of journalists to become convinced that they are in someway evil seems entirely possible. Also, if any large organisation is looked at in great depth examples and anecdotes to support a stand-point will be found eventually.

Perhaps most importantly though, bad employers do not keep good staff and without very good staff, Amazon would not be the stand-out success it is. Which makes the NYT article's "burn and churn" somewhat improbable.