Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

If I were a woman of larks or whims,1 I would never have made it through two phone screens and been flown here to sell myself in person. I’m a grinder, a hand raiser, a doer of extra-credit assignments. I’m the one who gets into the room with the men when there’s only one space for a woman. And I’ve crammed so hard for this lark that if it ends in rejection, I’ll be the one saying no. That’s how I like it. That’s how I need things to be.

I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that it’s enough to make decent money doing fun work with people I mostly like. But it isn’t. At AMG and in my liberal arts background, ambition is considered uncool and even a little embarrassing. I’m supposed to see work as a necessary evil. But I can’t help it. I like to work, and I want my work to leave a wake.

My entire career has involved entering fields I don’t know the first thing about, getting someone to hire me anyway, and learning on the job.

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.

I’m in first grade and have been designated “Gifted” and have been told I can be anything if I just put my mind to it. I love playing a board game called What Shall I Be? The Exciting Game of Career Girls, in which you draw cards qualifying or disqualifying you for six possible outcomes: model, actress, nurse, teacher, stewardess, and ballerina. (“You are overweight” is the worst card to draw, because it alone eliminates two-thirds of the options.)

1981: Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman nominated to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation hearing is the first one ever televised, and most of the questions are about abortion. Grown-ups ask if I’m excited about her. “I guess,” I say, because it had never occurred to me that having an all-male court was weird.

1984: Geraldine Ferraro is the first female vice presidential nominee from a major party. Grown-ups ask if I’m excited. “I guess,” I say with a shrug, because she seems kind of boring and old, and also because I have a feeling people are going to be really mean to her and it’s hard to be excited about that.

I understand by now that my father believes in me enough to have big expectations for my future. I also understand that I have to pretend I live in his world, where things aren’t different for me because of my body or my voice or the Bible. We are supposed to spend my life pretending I’m a man.

It hits me that someone wrote the Bible, that history is a series of human decisions about what’s worth remembering.

I notice for the first time that there are other good writers my age, too. It makes me nervous. I don’t like it when I might not be the best.

There are four of us in the room now: the two of them, me, and my body. Their chests are flat, but mine juts into the empty space between us, space that somehow still feels like theirs, as if my breasts were trespassing on their air.

I’m thirty-six, which seems like a shockingly advanced age to a thirty-six-year-old. Can I really avoid change, failure, and risk for the rest of my life? Even if I try, they seem bound to track me down.

By the time I run out of synonyms for “fear,” it’s pretty clear it’s the only real reason to say no and that if I do, I’ll have no one to blame but myself for the sameness and stagnation that follow.

“Fine,” I’ll say, because that’s all there is.

“They suggested we ‘find efficiencies.’ Which is Amazon-speak for ‘sorry your team is screwed, but it’s not our problem.’”

“Drinking from the fire hose” is the phrase I hear and relate to most, though. When you drink from a fire hose, you can’t think much about the taste or temperature of the water barreling down your throat. And there’s no time to consider whether you’re drinking the right amount, or if the drops that end up on your face might actually be more important to swallow than the ones that made it in. You just try to keep your esophagus working and trust that clarity will come in time, and that in the meantime your whole face won’t be blasted off.

“This is the most important thing to understand about Amazon. No one knows jack shit.”

I’m attuned to the fact that a lot of people see my employer as, you know, pure evil. My own views are complicated. It’s clear that by undercutting bookstores on price and offering fast delivery, Amazon is an existential threat to the kinds of shops I’ve loved since toddlerhood. But then, I’ve spent most of my life in cities that have good bookstores.

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

Meetings at 8:00 a.m. are just mean, so of course we have them all the time.

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

Nothing in my career has prepared me for this stuff. But of course I’m going to adapt, shape-shift while no one is looking. Of course Naomi is going to twist herself into knots trying to make Jack happy even when Jack is no longer doing his job. That’s the only story of work women like us know: cramming, speed learning, passing.

My heart leaps, not just because it’s nice to have someone validate the problem, but because I think that means it will get done, because I am wildly naive.

When I’m in a room with people beneath me in level, like the merchandisers, a solid third of them are women. But when I’m with my peers or senior leaders, men usually outnumber women at least three to one. And if it’s a meeting of developers and other tech employees, it’s a brofest at all levels. Both my ceiling and my floor are made of glass.

“I just keep feeling like they’re bound to fire me,” I say. “You’ve felt like that at every job you’ve ever had,” he says. “I know,” I say, nodding to the waiter for another glass of wine. “But maybe I finally made it come true. Maybe I’ve been working toward this failure all my life.”

“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.”

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.

“Do you ever just step back and find it fascinating that we’re expected to live like this?”

“Help me understand” is Amazon-speak for “you are an absolute fucking moron.”

We’ve noticed Chuck is generally easier on us than he is on the guys, but not in a condescending way. He seems more comfortable with us, more willing to give us the benefit of the doubt or to have us question his strategy or his interpretation of a piece of data. It’s as if knowing he can’t measure his dick against ours sets him free.

I wish someone would at least call for a ten-minute break, but it’s not going to be me. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the kinds of people who openly admit to needing food or pee breaks are also the kinds of people who get hurled off lifeboats around here.

I walked in here expecting to feel queasy about, you know, stack ranking the human beings I see and talk to every day. What I didn’t expect was how insidiously comforting it would feel in some ways. In an environment where my entire day’s plan can be wiped out on a moment’s notice, Grant being the thirty-sixth most valuable member of the organization feels simple and solid. Careful, I tell myself. This maybe isn’t the kind of thing you want to be too good at.

I’m not sure I want to stay at Amazon, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m getting thrown out of the fucking boat.

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.

I don’t really know how to disagree. My family had two settings: Everything Is Fine, and Screaming Fights with Lasting Damage.

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Question Mark emails are sent when something is so wrong or strange or seemingly inexplicable that words and sentences are a waste of time and Jeff wants a full accounting of what happened, exactly why it happened, and what is changing to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The universal reaction to receiving one is fuuuuuuuuuuck, because responding can easily consume several days and nights of your life and because the response has to satisfy one of the most terrifyingly powerful people on earth, who knows your name and is already not happy about something connected to you.

“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. From birth all the way through my job on Chuck’s team, I would have called myself an operator, someone who takes something already built and makes it run smoothly, refines it, improves it incrementally. But working under Calista is where I start to realize that what I really want to do is build, and more specifically that I want to build things that sound kind of nuts at first. Crazy is the high I’ll chase for the rest of my Amazon career, even as it starts to ruin me.

Most of my female colleagues are childless, and I sometimes wonder whether Amazon attracts women who are inherently uninterested in motherhood or if it just chokes the interest out of us once we’re here.

“We don’t ‘believe’ or ‘feel’ things at Amazon,” she said. “Not officially, anyway. We only think them, based on data.”

I feel like Philippe Petit, the high-wire artist who walked between the spires of Notre-Dame. It doesn’t matter how anodyne the topic; all might be fine now, but his questions could go in any direction, and if I have to improvise, I might slip and hit the ground as liquid and gore.