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.

There’s precarity in the way my new co-workers talk to me, too. “Now that you’re here,” I hear over and over. Now that you’re here, we can evaluate which email programs to grow and which to kill. Now that you’re here, the merchandisers can develop innovative new features for the site. Now that you’re here, we won’t work Saturday nights anymore. Now that you’re here, they’ll see how hard this job is. Now that you’re here, we will be loved. It feels like being Jesus, if everyone had a task list for Jesus written in acronyms he didn’t understand.

I realize that it’s kind of depressing to hear the word “crap” over and over so early in the day. The line between plainspoken and ugly is so fine,

“While I’ve got you here under this table,” I say, “could you tell me what OP1 is?” “Only your worst nightmare come to life.” “That’s kind of what I figured.”

“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.” He just laughs. “Dream big, baby.”

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.

It would be cruel for me to tell my mother how strangled I feel when she talks like this, how much I don’t want the immediate pressure to dazzle Jeff Bezos. Can’t it be enough for now that I didn’t accidentally spill something on him or freeze up? I know she’s trying to be supportive, but in the moment it’s just one thing too many, like when I started exceeding a 4.0 grade point average and suddenly that became the new standard I was expected to meet. My chest and throat feel tight with the knowledge that it isn’t fair.

As with the women on my own team, I don’t tell them that I feel just as crushed as they do, that I spend every Sunday feeling the first tugs of the tsunami. And yet it has never occurred to me that I’m lying to everyone. I want to help, and somewhere in my subconscious I think the way to help is to be a beacon of calm and encouragement, and I become that without stopping to question why, or if I might be making things worse by pretending any of this is sustainable.

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. Every morning I feel a little sick when I get on the elevator, as though I ate just a bite of something rotten, so I am angry but I think it’s IBS. I have to put my worst employee in the bottom 10 percent to make the curve, even though she’s still pretty good, so I am angry but I think it’s softness. My best employee is a quivering wreck and my praise goes right through her, her eyes darting in mistrust until I’m half convinced I am lying to her, and I am angry but I think it’s lack of compassion. I’m about to join the demographic known as “over forty,” and I am angry but I think it’s body dysmorphia. All the money is starting to seem normal and not like winning a prize every day, and I am angry but I think it’s ingratitude.

I notice that a man who works for me and is one level down in the organization makes forty thousand dollars a year more than I do. My thoroughly internalized shame almost talks me out of saying something. It’s not like you’re starving, I tell myself, as though that were the bar for dissatisfaction with pay.

Productive tension, I remind myself. Productive tension is fine. And what is a job anyway, if not a chance to ruin your life?

Toxic masculinity in Silicon Valley has been a mini-trend online lately, with stories in tech magazines about parties with models paid to attend and coercive boss/employee hot tubbing. But as always, masculinity at Amazon looks more like stoicism and duty than cocaine and ball-pit orgies. It’s having months of work brutally torn apart in a meeting and saying, “Thank you for the feedback.” It’s calling into the WBR from vacation without being asked. It’s the carefully neutral way you say “Good times” when things go sideways. I think maybe Silicon Valley hires the high-fiving princes of entitlement, and Amazon goes for the men raised to believe work and fun should be poles apart.

“Work-life balance,” says the AWS guy with a shrug. Here we go. “Say more about that,” Brian says. “Women have children,” he says. “Work-life balance is critical for moms.” I catch the eye of the lone female cohort member, keeping my gaze neutral but wondering if she’s as fascinated as I am by the mystical simplicity of “women have children.”

Web Services guy is still thinking about work-life balance. “The problem is, Amazon doesn’t support work-life balance for anyone,” he says, to murmurs of agreement. “It just affects women differently, because women are moms. So … what do we do to support healthier work-life balance for everyone?

“I mean, I’m sure every person in this room would love to see more women in Amazon leadership roles.” Heads nod vigorously as though these men have never craved anything more. “But what would it mean for us to become the kind of family-friendly company where that can happen? Would it mean moving slower? Having less aggressive goals?”

“I just want to challenge an assumption some of you seem to be making,” I say. “What data is not on the handout?” I wait five, ten, fifteen seconds. “There’s no mention of parenting status. You’re making assumptions in the absence of data, which could easily lead to the wrong solutions.” Am I a mom too? I want to ask. Is every woman you see someone designed to spend her life catering to someone else’s needs?

This is the moment it finally truly lands that I will never outrun my gender. Of course on some level I’ve known that for years, but never so starkly. I will never overcome the belief that the presence of women means a slower, softer, weaker Amazon. There is nothing I can do to make these men any smarter or less blind, because they’re the norm and I’m a deviation. Or a deviant, a kidless mom, an outlier. A shock of energy runs through my body, but there’s no place for it here.

someone asks what he perceives as the biggest threat to Amazon’s future, and he says the two words that have already gone viral among employees in recent months: “Social cohesion.” If people just fall in line with each other instead of pushing for truth, he says, it will hamper Amazon’s ability to find the right answers.

a new feeling has started to play around the edges. It’s a giddy feeling, which is strange because it involves me not getting what I want, but it’s undeniable, and this is what it says: If you can never outrun your gender here, then you’re off the hook for trying. If you’re fucked, maybe you’re also free.

tell myself to please remember this day when just being myself did not in fact lead directly to doom.

Bar Raiser requests are coming in from far-flung parts of campus for teams I’ve never heard of. I ask Recruiting what’s up and am told there’s a new rule that every interview loop must include a woman, but a lot of teams don’t have any women of their own to call on.

I’ve been at Amazon longer than all but 2 percent of employees. I don’t know how to feel about that—proud, embarrassed, important, lost? Contrary to the tool’s name, one thing I don’t feel is old. I’m sober, I’m writing, I kind of like myself. What I am is tired. I’m too young to feel this tired.

For a chronically anxious person, I seem to live for leaping into the unknown. “I’m the best writer at Amazon,” I say. “So if you need someone to guide customers through a sea change, you need me.” I hadn’t planned to say that, but I also think it’s true. I look up to see if Josh is appalled and see that he’s smiling bigger than ever.

I don’t mean this personally, but Amazon’s arbitrary office policy is not my problem. Sure, give me an office mate, that’s fine. But I’m not going to spend one minute worrying about the optics of being able to do the work Amazon ostensibly wants me to do.” Within a day the design leader and I are in an office, and just by getting out of the line of sight, I find that my productivity triples. And I make a note that sometimes asking for what you need turns out okay.

And the thing is, I’m not going to try to be nearly superhuman. Not anymore. Until I got sober, I thought sobriety was something you could berate yourself into, but it doesn’t work that way. To stay sober, I have to allow myself to be just a person who does her best. And it doesn’t really matter that my best is still a pretty fucking lofty standard; by Amazon standards I will always be failing just a little bit.

I’m leaving a totally normal one-on-one with Josh the next day when he says, “Oh, by the way, there’s some chatter going around that Jasper and Grant felt intimidated by how you talked to them in a meeting yesterday.” He’s already turned back to his desktop monitor when he speaks. I sigh and sit back down. “Chatter from where?” “Just around,” he says, as I knew he would. Josh’s habit is to ascribe any negative feedback to the ether, so instead of knowing whom to go have a grown-up conversation with, you get to walk around wondering which of twenty possible people are mad at you.

“I’m just telling you what people are saying because your role is so broad and so critical that it would be dangerous for the project if you’re someone people are afraid to work with.” “Wow, okay,” I say. “I raise my voice once in eleven years at one of the most notoriously brutal companies on earth and now I have a rep as scary to work with.”

You can’t outrun it. You will always be a deviation, an alien, a guest worker, an uneasily transplanted organ. You might be tolerated, even beloved and respected, but you will never be a citizen, and the problem isn’t how you look or talk or act. The problem is that there is no right way to be a woman. In their eyes you will always be a bit too female or not quite female enough, and trying to walk the tightrope will kill you. The silver lining: if you can’t outrun your gender, you might as well live as you please. It may be the freedom of the truly fucked, but I suggest you take it.

I’m just going back to the place where I exchange time and effort for money among people whose company I mostly enjoy.

“What if there were an umbrella role for copy and voice across all of our brick-and-mortar businesses? I’d love to do that job.” Just the thought of it gives me a stomach flutter that says the fun kind of overwhelm lies ahead. “Well, that would require organizational changes,” Josh says. “But don’t worry. I’m keeping my eyes open for opportunities for you. Just hang in there and be patient.” It’s the same talk I had with my boss at AMG when he was at a loss for how to extend my career path. I’m keeping my eyes open, so just trust and be patient. Just keep being patient. Patient and quiet.

It’s not the first time I’ve felt as if Amazon were daring me to do my job. But I no longer believe there’s any reward for winning the dare. Amazon’s going to cram as many bodies into as little space as possible, and the prize for doing good work under lousy conditions will be getting to do more work under lousy conditions.

The human just feels forgotten. I trusted Josh enough to take this job blind. I’ve talked to him almost every day for three years, about design and writing and office politics but also college and family and anxiety (mine and his) and our shared belief that The Leftovers is the finest television show in history. And about my career path. I’ve long since shed any illusions that I matter to Amazon the capitalist organism, which is bearable as long as I matter to the people around me. If I don’t matter to Josh, I’m lost.

I might have outgrown Amazon, I think, laughing silently. And I don’t want to shrink myself to fit anymore.

I’m pretty sure the answer is no. But I want to make him say it.

I think a lot in my last two weeks about the difference between leaving and quitting. I long to feel the punctuation of quitting, as if a sentence were ending. But what I feel instead is more that I’m just not going to be coming here and doing things anymore. I’ll be four miles away, not at Amazon, but still of Amazon, for the foreseeable future.