The Ins, Outs, Ups and Downs of One Woman’s 12-Year Amazon Career

EXIT INTERVIEW: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, by Kristi Coulter

In 2023, it’s laborious to think about anybody who doesn’t have an opinion about Amazon or is unfamiliar with its remedy of its staff. Through the tales which have come out, it’s straightforward to kind an image of the corporate, however what in regards to the individuals who make up the group? Why would anybody work there? That image is lacking a face.

Enter Kristi Coulter and her new memoir, “Exit Interview.” Coulter spent 12 years at Amazon, her tenure starting in 2006. At that point, Amazon was greater than a decade outdated and its media e-commerce enterprise was already “mature.” But Twitter was simply rising; Facebook was barely two years outdated; Instagram was nonexistent; and Apple’s launch of the primary iPhone was a 12 months away. Even with the smoldering stays of the dot-com period seen within the rearview mirror, the tech business nonetheless fostered an air of alternative, potential and self-reinvention — manifest future remade for Twenty first-century captains of business, a brand new frontier with out the pesky limitations of a finite continent.

That spirit and potential for development hooked Coulter. She was working at All Music Guide (now often called AllMusic), however she felt tired of and stifled by her job. Casting about for brand new alternatives led her to interview at Amazon. Conflicted however intrigued, she ultimately discovered her rationale for becoming a member of: Coulter needed to be someplace the place it was OK to be formidable, someplace that supplied actual, large challenges. She didn’t need a profession path — she needed a profession vector, one thing with course and magnitude that, in her phrases, would “leave a wake.”

In “Exit Interview,” Coulter takes us by the ins, outs, ups and downs of her Amazon profession, with roles starting from senior supervisor in books and media merchandising to working Amazon Crossing, Amazon’s e book publishing imprint for literature in translation, and ultimately ending her tenure as a principal author, designing all the language system for the primary bodily Amazon Go retailer. (That model is now often called Amazon Fresh.)

She was plunged into chaos from the start. Employees appeared to exist in a state of fixed overwork and panic. Projects had been gargantuan, nearly maniacally so. In her first position, she was accountable for each managing a worldwide merchandising group and by some means fixing a merchandising system so damaged it brought on staff to do their complicated duties twice. “This is the most important thing to understand about Amazon. No one knows jack,” a colleague tells her, utilizing an expletive.

Well, somebody does, it appears: Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s senior vice presidents, who had been (and nonetheless are) principally males. One of those S.V.P.s will inform her, in a gathering with others current, that her work is silly. Then he’ll name her silly. He won’t ever apologize, and ultimately she is going to depart his group. Along the way in which, she’ll be instructed repeatedly she must have extra spine, however when she has it, she’ll be seen as prickly and intimidating. Time after time, a promotion to director stage is dangled earlier than her, however regardless of her success in a variety of senior roles, she leaves with out having ever been elevated.

Anyone searching for the within scoop on Amazon can be in luck. Maddening tales and particulars in regards to the firm are considerable, if sometimes too plentiful — typically the give attention to challenge trivialities bogs down the narrative, though Coulter brings the reader alongside by sharing the bewilderment she felt whereas coping with the hearth hose of knowledge she confronted.

Coulter’s writing is humorous and heat, bringing to life a solid of individuals caught in the identical company maelstrom. She describes herself as a relentless individuals pleaser, a self-critic longing to faucet into the ambition she noticed crushed out in ladies of earlier generations. She explains that she discovered early in life easy methods to envelop males in her “force field of earnest competence,” harness her will, determine any job and by no means let anybody down.

If something, Coulter works nearly too laborious to indicate how laborious she needed to work. She frets about failure, promotions, the worry of disappointing everybody, however the reader is aware of she was a extremely paid senior-level worker who stored opting to remain on the firm. She describes horror after horror, however she additionally says “parts of it were astounding and fun.” Some readers could also be pissed off by this pressure and want for a greater understanding of why she stayed; others who’ve made related trade-offs, or who’ve spent their lives as formidable people-pleasers, will see themselves mirrored in Coulter’s narrative and really feel validated by it. This can be very true for girls working in related company cultures, no matter business.

Coulter makes use of two lenses to border her narrative: one educated particularly on herself and her experiences at Amazon, and one other centered extra broadly on the experiences ladies in every single place face on the planet. In two separate chapters, each titled “Events in the History of Female Employment,” she weaves historic milestones for girls’s rights within the office with moments from her personal life.

By situating her expertise in a bigger feminist narrative, Coulter provides her story a extra common software. But along with her give attention to Amazon, she opens a set of questions that she leaves unanswered: Is Amazon’s sexism distinctive? If not, then what’s it that makes Amazon so uniquely poisonous? If corporations like Amazon are each great and terrible in various measures, is the purpose that we are going to all the time need to navigate the dangerous to attempt to harness the nice for our personal private development and acquire?

In such a system, there are only a few moments once we actually imagine we’re profitable. Too usually there isn’t a triumphant finale. Things don’t finish with a bang, however a dawning realization that the private price is, ultimately, too nice.

Leah Reich’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and The Verge. She has labored in tech for over a decade, at Instagram, Spotify and Slack, amongst different corporations.

EXIT INTERVIEW: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career | By Kristi Coulter | 368 pp. | MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $29