Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

You will also build new internal content-management tools with Band-Aids and Scotch tape by working closely with understaffed technical leaders

If you end up hating this job, no worries! It will be unrecognizable in six months anyway.

ability to be dropped into any situation with a blowgun, tourniquet, and Excel 97, and figure shit out fast

passed a large sculpture I didn’t notice before of headless people climbing a ladder,

“The work our merchandisers do is criminally manual, and their tool set is insanely outdated,”

It will continue to be 10 years after this experience.

“So their jobs are hard, tedious, and exhausting, and they don’t have any meaningful way to know if they’re succeeding or not.”

a job for which my main qualification was thinking all dogs should live forever.

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 brought my inner Hillary Clinton to work and through sheer effort and practice learned to explain semicolons and to identify the specific golden retrievers whose DNA could help to solve genetic puzzles and to write SQL queries.

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.

Salvageable?

😂🫠

It takes all I have not to add like a goddamn grown-up instead of a spoiled man-child.

“I didn’t see why I should have to charm him [like a motherfucking courtesan, I don’t add] into performing the core functions of his role.

In Gifted, I spend as much time as I can writing stories and poems and plays, and my parents read them all. “I just hope you don’t expect me to support you when you can’t earn a living,” my dad jokes, which makes me bristle.

Nearly an exact retelling of me explaining I wanted to major in English.

My dad still reminds me that he’s not going to support me when I become an adult writer

“What’s the absolute least amount of money you can live on?” asks the CEO. I take a deep breath and tell him thirty thousand. “Then I’ll pay you thirty-one,” he says, and I feel like a master negotiator.

And it’s not because they’re malevolent men. They just didn’t think, because they don’t have to think.

Is the job even doable by anyone? Why were things allowed to get so bad for Amazon’s merchandisers, and does anyone really think one person can fix it?

“I can’t spend my entire life making backup infrastructures just in case.”

“You have to tell them we absolutely, categorically cannot do this for six more months. It will literally kill people.”

George and I are in Columbia Center’s dim food court for our one-on-one; conference rooms are scarce resources that I’m told often book up days or even weeks in advance,

This was always the most ridiculously annoying thing about working in the office

It was supposed to be like this for just three crappy weeks, ending tomorrow. But this morning, the tech lead on the project side broke it to George that in order to gather more data, the plan is now to run the two platforms in parallel for six months.

It's never just three weeks...

merchandisers not only write the words customers will see but also hand code the XML that makes the campaign appear on the site, versus just pasting their copy into a template.

the homegrown content tool I was brought in to fix is even worse than I imagined. Yesterday I sat with a merchandiser for an hour as she wrote and coded a campaign, squinting to make sure she’d placed every bracket and backslash right.

Spoilers: it doesn't get any better by 2016 🫠

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

“Maybe I can embarrass him into a more reasonable plan.

At first I assume my crash landing is unusual, that most new hires don’t face a crisis on day two.

lol

“Half the buyers have flat out said they won’t use the automated system because they don’t trust a computer to set prices.

Resignation and shame permeate the air, as though everyone secretly thinks it’s all their fault.

Now that you’re here, we can evaluate which email programs to grow and which to kill.

Also spoilers: no one did this at Kindle for 10 years until I showed up 🫠✨️

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.

there’s no ranking system, sort order, or filter I can apply without letting someone down.

Another is pleasant but dead behind the eyes, as though conserving her energy for a siege.

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.”

Everyone already knows the merchandisers can stay miserable and inefficient and Amazon will survive.

Maybe there are places in the company where my breath can reach my lungs again instead of stopping at my throat.

“It’s important to find a sustainable balance. Maybe that means a few times a year you leave at five thirty on a Friday to hang out with your family.

OMG

ginseng tea and an “energizing cold plunge” are not going to mitigate the effects of working in a wind tunnel full of projectiles.

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.

But a year ago I was also less threadbare. I rarely worried about work at night, and almost never had to bring it home with me. I worked with reasonably happy people whom I never had to contemplate hurling off a lifeboat. It didn’t feel as if any small wrong move might bring down the whole company and ruin my life.

“There are rumors,”

“Kristi, please try hard not to be an idiot,”

Yelling and being dramatic is how we show we love each other.”

Warning, red flag

maybe I’ll stop being terrified all day every day.

If he’s patting shoulders, it means shit has become profoundly destabilized.

I sometimes wonder whether Amazon attracts women who are inherently uninterested in motherhood

“We don’t ‘believe’ or ‘feel’ things at Amazon,”

Unless you're an executive who gets to throw all the rules out the window and make people do things based off of your wrong feelings all the time

I’ve been in six-pager reviews full of challenging but friendly debate, and others where a VP’s first comment was, “There’s a typo a third of the way down on page 4,” delivered with the same gravity as if the author had used the wrong financial model.

“It’s fine. I just switched two numbers in the campaign ID because I’m nervous.”

Same

Eino, thirty-six, says in his goodbye email that he’s leaving to regain his health.