Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

(Ironically, with her sponsorship I’ll later make a pitch for Amazon to have more than three proofreaders worldwide, and our senior VP will shoot it down because no, I can’t actually quantify the effect of typos and snarled syntax on free cash flow.)

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. Everyone sympathizes with the recipient of a? email, but there’s also a tendency to avoid direct eye contact lest you be sucked into the response vortex. Eldin answered one on my old team, and even the minor supporting data he needed from me took hours to vet and re-vet and re-re-vet until the numbers looked like an alien code and I had a sweaty nightmare that I’d gotten them wrong.

Also, I know by now that when Jeff says “I think” or “we should,” it means “This Is How It Shall Be.” Despite the Leadership Principles, if he were inviting disagreement, he’d say so.

The secondary purpose of your trip is to reinforce that Amazon is a global brand that presents one face to the world. 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 merchandisers show you their competitors’ websites, teeming with color and animations and pop-ups. “They want access to elements like this,” the manager acting as translator explains. Here is your test! They are asking to deviate from the global brand. Nod sympathetically and deliver the party line: “I understand. But Amazon prefers simple pages that load fast and keep focus on the products we sell. Amazon wants us to think only about customers, not about what competitors are doing.”

12:00 p.m.: A merchandiser from Kitchen pulls me aside after a meeting. “Can we find some time to talk this week?” she asks. “Even fifteen minutes.” She’s obviously been crying. Of course, I say. I’ve talked to a lot of crying merchandisers by now, usually women. The talk usually takes some form of “I can’t anymore”: the weekend work, the midnight emails, the Sunday night stomachaches, the sense that none of it adds up to much in the company’s eyes. I tell them they need to make peace with the fact that they’ll never really feel finished when they stop working for the day. That they’re all doing the jobs of at least two people and it’s normal to live underwater.

“I know this is very small comfort,” she says as the door opens on her floor, “but he wouldn’t have talked to you like that if he didn’t think you could take it. He treated you like the leader you are.”

2011: A Pennsylvania newspaper publishes a horrifying news story about a Lehigh Valley Amazon warehouse where temperatures soar to more than one hundred degrees in summer. So many workers suffer heat exhaustion and heatstroke that Amazon has paramedics on call. Production quotas aren’t reduced in extreme heat, and employees too blurry-eyed to see straight have been fired for failing to meet theirs.

At other warehouses, the loading dock doors are kept open to provide a cross breeze, but Amazon keeps them closed on the assumption that it prevents employee theft.

Today we’re reviewing a press release and FAQ written by Bess. The PR/FAQ is Amazon’s newest viral document craze, a mock press release that forces teams to imagine how they might present their project to the world before they dive into building it. It’s really useful for identifying blind spots and weaknesses, and also really hard to write.

“It doesn’t matter now, maybe. What happens when she wants to change roles in a few years, though?” This keeps coming up with Bar Raisers, that the people we’re interviewing aren’t fungible. It’s a holdover from when we were mostly a retailer and the conventional wisdom was not to hire anyone we couldn’t imagine in at least three different Amazon roles.

I swear he pales. “Can’t you find an internal candidate who’s a romance fan? Someone with a passion for the space but an analytical mind?” “No,” I say. “We need professionals, not fans. And she has an analytical mind. She knows where a manuscript isn’t working and why. She negotiates contracts. That’s all analysis. It’s just not math.” I can tell I’ve almost got him. “I just want to reiterate that the vlookup thing threw me,” he says. “That’s basic, basic stuff.” It’s tempting to confess that I also don’t know how to do a vlookup, but this probably isn’t the moment.

“It’s easy,” Ron says with a sweep of his hand. “Just change the world.” I look up from my steno pad. “Sorry, what?” “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.

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 then frowning on any rat who looks hungry.

“What choice do I have?” I say. “I’ve had, what, four jobs in six years? I don’t have it in me to start over at Amazon yet again. I need some kind of stability.” I’ve been browsing the internal job board, but the postings are full of words like “relentless” and “tireless” and “obsessed” and there’s far too much bragging about foosball competitions and Beer Tuesdays. It’s probably all very exciting if one is a Soylent-chugging college boy, but I don’t make career decisions based on who has the best Nerf wars.

John sighs. “Don’t do this. Your career narrative says you’re a goddamn Green Beret at this point. It’s this fantasy of being unemployable outside Amazon that’s insane.” “I heard Nordstrom won’t even hire Amazon people anymore because we come barging in like assholes who know everything,” I say. “Yes, you’ve told me that thirty times,” John says. “And I heard Starbucks has an official deprogramming process for us because we arrive so fucked up.” It looks for a moment as if the show were starting, but it’s just roadies

Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others, the saying goes, but ours got lost or ripped along the way, and Amazon doesn’t care. “Ron said his job is to keep throwing things at me until I tell him I’m drowning,” Sally tells me. “Why do we have to live that way?” Sally is as battle hardened as Amazonians come. For her to complain is no small thing. But she can’t stop the deluge that cascades past her onto all of us.

Like me, she taught college-level literature until the need to eat and have health insurance won out.5 I