Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

Here is how I got every single one of those jobs: I sat across a desk from a man old enough to be my father and I enveloped us both in a force field of earnest competence, the kind I’d been practicing since kindergarten with my hand permanently raised in class, the kind that says I will die before I let you down, and at some point in each of those interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down.

1982: The ERA extension passes without any additional states having ratified it, and with five states having changed their fucking minds and voted to rescind their earlier ratifications.

Something seems to have dawned on my boss. “Wait, are you uncomfortable?” he asks. “Porn’s not a problem for me,” I say coolly, which is true. What is a problem is that this is happening the very day I went from underling to executive. It feels as though they were reminding me that above all else, I’m a female body. And it’s not because they’re malevolent men. They just didn’t think, because they don’t have to think.

I find myself telescoping outward as I sometimes do in strange places or circumstances. I’m sitting on a stool in a box in a clay hut in a village on an island in the middle of the ocean between two continents on the planet Earth. It sounds kind of unlikely, and yet here I am. I think of other places that sounded impossible to be until I was there, like the top of the Duomo in Florence or a bar on stilts off the Bahamian coast. Or the tiny French restaurant in the back of Pike Place Market where John and I ate moules frites and watched bald eagles acting all casual above Elliott Bay. In each of those places I’d had the momentary thrill of knowing my life had expanded a little more.

It’s not that I’m being hazed. My co-workers are kind and helpful. But they’re above the surface, so to reach one, I have to stretch my arm up blindly and hope I’m grabbing at the right person and that they have time to come hang with me under the sea. And even when they do, I can tell from their eyes that they don’t really have time, that every minute spent orienting me is one where something else might be blowing up just out of sight. And Arjun’s right: everyone here is operating on partial information.

it quickly becomes clear why the merchandising role they oversee is considered such a clusterfuck. For one thing, the people in it were mostly hired in Amazon’s early days, when the job called for merchandisers to write reviews and use their taste and expertise to help customers discover the best books and movies and albums. Then two things happened. First, co-op, the pay-for-exposure system

Second, Amazon discovered that letting an algorithm make recommendations for customers resulted in many, many more sales than an editorial recommendation.

But already I understand that at Amazon normal human limits are an embarrassing affliction like IBS or erectile dysfunction, not to be discussed in public.

At all my other jobs, within a few weeks I’ve found some solid ground to stand on. At Amazon, every time I take a steady step forward, something knocks me a step and a half back, and my days feel no closer to taking on reliable patterns than they did when I arrived.

“It’s just interesting,” I say. “Because I took the job with the mandate to solve editorial problems, and then I got here and realized they were actually operational problems. And now I’m starting to think, no, they’re cultural problems.”

CRAP, the new acronym for Cannot Realize Any Profit, focused on items where the accumulated costs of Amazon buying and storing them outweigh any money to be made by selling them.

Is it a man thing, to keep doing what you’re best at even when no one wants it anymore?

The co-op team has started letting vendors pay for dedicated head count, a.k.a. junior merchandisers straight out of college who work on just one vendor’s behalf, ensuring their product pages are flawless and that even their deepest catalog gets featured on the site. We meet with Jeff Fucking Wilke to brief him on the program

“I’m thinking about how I have to do all of this again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next,” I say. “It feels so heavy.”

There are so many men here,

Can they just play devil’s advocate for a second? Can they just pressure test your idea? Can they just push back on that a little? These last three are them saying you are wrong. Sometimes they say it in an Amazon way and sometimes in a man way, though already the difference is getting pretty hard to discern.

“Sure,” I say. “But what’s a Lifeboat Exercise?”

It is as grotesque as it sounds: a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.

George did well here for many years, and then the tide turned and we culled him. I’m doing well now, but when the tide turns—and the tide always turns—I have absolutely no doubt they’ll cull me too.

Be an advocate for women at work plural, but not myself as a woman at work singular. Always take credit for my accomplishments, but also let my accomplishments speak for themselves. Raise my hand for new assignments to be helpful, not eager. Dress to embrace my femininity but also to de-emphasize my boobs, shoulders, waist, hips, legs, lips, and hair. And smile. But not too much. Less. Less. Yes, like that. Now hold.

“Kristi, please try hard not to be an idiot,” Arjun says. “You know how to manage people, yes? You know how to write a solid document and think critically. You understand how Amazon uses data. You can persuade people on other teams to do things. This is 90 percent of most jobs at Amazon. The other 10 percent is just shit to learn, which you can also do.”

William Bruce Cameron quote in her email signature: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

“Being tough isn’t the same thing as being mean, you know. I think you need to internalize that.”

There’s a saying in tech that some people are builders and some are operators.

You may be told international teams “need” custom, specific widgets and graphics and site features in order to grow their business in their countries. Resist this! Reassure them that Seattle loves them and understands their needs better than they do. Reassure them their needs are already being met and that in time they will agree.

“The only way out is through,” people say, but they’re talking about heartache or grief, not Tuesday.

“This person also needs to be able to write,” I note. “Any college graduate can write,” he says. “Not marketing copy. Not for tens of millions of people to read.” “That can at least be taught,” Mike says. “Unlike an analytical mindset.”

“It’s just that you’re looking for the Purple Panda. Everyone is. You want great creatives who also have MBAs and world-class quantitative skills, and you want to hire them to do mostly low-level grunt work. These people do not exist.”

Because Mitch gets to throw toddler fits while I’m not allowed to show emotion at all, I am angry but I think it’s shame.

One night John asks what I think about a local ballot referendum, and instead of just telling him, I find myself composing a paragraph free from ambiguity or feeling words or rhetorical gaps he could nail me on, and I realize I do it all the time now, translate myself into Amazon-speak even when I’m the only one listening, and I am angry and sad and maybe scared, but I think it’s just assimilation. Because I know that Amazon is the god to be pleased, and Amazon is men, and thus all men are Amazon, I am angry but I think it’s just my brain, my inferior alien brain.

came to Amazon not knowing how to write software requirements, throw people off a lifeboat, stand in the path of a Beijing taxi to make it stop for me, or write in the voice of Jeff Bezos. Surely I can figure publishing out, too. Maybe publishing will be the place where I really find my feet and lose my fear. And while such a context shift might seem random, at Amazon it’s pretty normal.

have enough ideas to keep edging it forward indefinitely. But none of it’s going to add up to a story that will get me promoted, or even necessarily thanked. Granted, that’s the Amazon way: promotions, most notoriously the one I’m in line for, are scarce and mysteriously granted, and still having a job counts as thanks. Not getting promoted doesn’t make me weird.

might have learned to navigate these far-flung cities, but the unlikeliness of being in them at all can still bring a lump of gratitude to my throat. Amazon shoved me into the wide world, and now I know I can stand on my feet in it.

A handful of Salesforce licenses would actually be life changing, we realize, but the dev team balks: We wouldn’t be able to modify the code to add new features. That’s okay, we say, Salesforce has all we need. But what if someday we need a new feature they don’t support? Like what? That’s the point! We don’t know! It could be anything! What we do know is we’re drowning now, we say, and making stupid errors.

But what if Salesforce steals the data from us and uses it for their own benefit? This fatal case of Not Invented Here Syndrome goes on for weeks, until we blink first.

2012: It’s an election year, so time for a new round of “Women: Are They People, or Just Host Bodies?”

I had no idea at eighteen that my basic bodily autonomy would still be in jeopardy at forty-two. No one tells you it will never, ever stop.

2014: Speaking at a conference for women in tech, the CEO of Microsoft tells women that rather than ask for pay raises, they should simply trust the system. It’s good karma, he says.

Just three Gen X women scrambling to make it clear that we would never make waves over a harmless workplace cum-ingestion joke, but these kids today: they’re soft; we must protect them.

It’s a very Amazon happiness, tenuous and a little guilty and heavily contingent on drinking—with authors, with colleagues, with myself at night when I need to forget that in nine hours I have to get up and do it all over again. It feels weird to be happy working for a company so intensely loathed. And feeling happy also makes me worry I’m just not paying close enough attention, that I’ve become blind to my own inadequacies and now they’ll lead to my doom.

“Change the world,” he repeats, “and when I go into that roomful of executives to make the case for you, it will be an easy sell.” The faces of men in this org who’ve recently been promoted past me drift through my mind. Most of them seem more than competent, but I’m not aware of anything world changing they’ve done.

I start to worry I’ve become the thing Calista once warned me about: someone who wants a promotion too much. “They can smell it on you, and if they can smell it, they won’t give it to you,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I need to pretend that external recognition is just a cute little extra bonus and that consistently delivering world-changing greatness for Amazon’s benefit is its own intrinsic reward.

But everyone I know here is trying to get promoted. True, most of us grew up as hyper-achievers.

Amazon didn’t create our yearning for recognition, but it exploits it for maximum return by holding the rat pellet just out of reach and the...

In rare moments of perspective, it’s clear that all of the women here are working so hard just to hold it together and manage our jobs that we have very little time or energy left for helping each other the way we used to.

almost laugh out loud at the notion of deciding to let myself fail.

to look big again and I have to back away from it. But I store away the idea that failure could be exactly what I need.

You try so hard to be good at things you don’t actually want to do. You never ask yourself if maybe you should just stop doing them.

also, Amazon Publishing was “a carnival of chaos, missed signals, and male entitlement,” and the idea of dealing with it any longer made her want to lie down in the road.

He’s also a bit in love with his own thinking. I find myself asked to “pressure test” his ideas, only for him to decide every time that he was right after all.