Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

Like a lot of people, I rose to management by excelling as an individual at tasks that have fuck all to do with running a team.

There are so many men here, men from Sloan and the University of Michigan and McKinsey and Deloitte. They’re transitioning to barefoot running. They bought Vibrams last month, and a sous vide machine. They like Big Hairy Audacious Goals, and in college they once saw Modest Mouse five times in a year. They have three kids and a wife with an expired law license because it just made more sense for her to be the stay-at-home parent. They work standing up. They’ve slowly come around on Belgian ales, and Tim Ferriss’s book really made them think. They wish they had more time to read. They like their steak rare and their hot sauce vicious. When they interrupt you at your desk, they’re sorry for the drive-by. When something goes wrong, they’re working on a path to green. They don’t just agree; they violently agree. They’re blocking and tackling and focused on the inputs and not getting distracted by orthogonal matters. Going paleo has been huge for them, and tequila is allowed. 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.

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.

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.

“Just, what strikes you about each one?” Lorna says. I know Lorna a bit from group happy hours, where she never seems exactly pleased to see me and reacts to anything I say with poker-faced silence. At first I wondered what I could possibly have done to earn the hostility, but then I started to notice that she was like that with others too, and that it wasn’t hostility, but more like a mix of shyness and a complete disinterest in charming people.

“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 is quietly happy for me, which is how I want it. I can’t handle the pressure of him treating me like a conquering hero. He immediately stops drinking at home, though I tell him he doesn’t need to on my account. I tell Marnie offhandedly and she gives me the great gift of reacting in kind.

“It’s so nice to see you too!” she says, and then we just stand there smiling at each other, and it occurs to me she might not remember, either. Finally she gestures to her tray of sushi and nods toward Mercer Street. “Well, I’m heading to the lake to eat lunch.” Wait, what? I stand there clutching my plastic clamshell and watching her walk away. I mean, I know Lake Union is just across the street, but it’s never occurred to me that I could go to it. Well, she is French, I think. Maybe all the French employees meet up and have lunch in swan boats while drinking Pernod and reading Balzac out loud. Anything could be happening over there.

Things get off to a good start, with the romance team pitching a woman/merman love story (in this post-Twilight world, romance authors have started going pretty far afield in search of mythical beings who fuck).

When we break for dinner, I linger in the classroom, which is actually the grand stone-and-beam event room at Sleeping Lady, a retreat center two hours outside Seattle. It’s snowy on this side of Stevens Pass, and the view outside is woody and idyllic, like a Pacific Northwest spin on Currier and Ives. “So, that was possibly the most useful feedback I’ve heard in my entire Amazon career,” I tell Brian once the last student has left. “Say more about that,” he says, which is his response at least half the time anyone says anything, it being a trainer’s habit to keep people talking once they’ve started. I think. He waits. “Well, it was practical,” I say. “You suggested something I could do, versus just ‘be better at drawing students out.’ And it was in the moment, so I could try it out right away. Now that I’ve tried it, I won’t be too nervous about doing it again. It was honestly very helpful to me.” Brian smiles. “That’s how all feedback should work,” he says. “By the way, the time from when you asked the question to when Daniel responded was just ten seconds. I clocked it.” “That’s insane,” I say. “Time can be that way.”

“What about coming in here when you need to focus?” he suggests, gesturing at his conference table. “I’d be happy for the company.” It’s sweet, but Josh has meetings in his office half the day. I take a deep breath and do something I can’t recall ever doing before: ask for working conditions that actually enable my work. “There’s empty office space up and down the row,” I say. “Why don’t you just put me in an office?” “I think those are all on hold for future L8 hires,” he says. “But they’re empty now. So assign me to one and then kick me out when these future executives come along.” “Let me see what I can do,” he says. “But I’ll have to find someone to put in there with you. The optics of an L7 with a private office are not great.” “Josh, 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.

“Yeah, it’s believable,” I say now. In truth, I do have trouble imagining the conversation where the manager of the woman who had a stillbirth tells her she’s going on probation, and the conversations with HR leading up to it. I can’t quite make a human scene out of it in my head. But I believe it. Partly because my own first thought on reading that part was, Well, how long post-stillbirth was she off her game? Are we talking three weeks, or three months? Straight to the place where my own skin as her boss might be at risk and I’d have to choose which one of us to sacrifice. “I was afraid you’d say that,” Megan says.

“Are you sure?” Jasper asks. “Because I just really feel like I see ‘rape’ much more frequently.” “I am,” I say. “Epicurious, Bon Appétit, Food52—they all use ‘rabe.’ Honestly, I was surprised myself by the strength of the consensus.” That’s a lie. I wasn’t remotely surprised that all those sites picked the non-sex-crime spelling. I’m just trying to give him a graceful way not to die on this hill. But he doesn’t want my grace. “Well, I can see you’ve done your homework,” he says. “I’m just concerned that customers will be confused. In the name of Customer Obsession and Ownership, I have to say something.” Oh, goody, is this the part where he flings around Leadership Principles he doesn’t understand? I guess it is.

“Efficiencies will not double our capacity,” Megan says. “We can’t magically make bandwidth. We have to be able to plan and staff for this stuff.” Grant, who would clearly prefer not to be in this room, nods. “But that’s not how innovation works,” Jasper says, and maybe it’s the soothing, horse-gentling tone in his voice that finally makes me raise my voice for the first time in my entire Amazon career. “Hey, look,” I say. It’s sort of a bark, though less than a yell. “Don’t tell Megan she doesn’t know how innovation works. She knows how innovation works, and it doesn’t mean just making twice the stuff with inadequate resources and expecting people who are supposed to be your partners to suck it up at all costs. Okay?” Jasper and Grant flush. Megan looks a little gleeful but more dismayed. Pepper stretches her front legs. And I wonder what the fuck I just did and how badly I’m going to pay for it.