Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

by Kristi Coulter

You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three. —JEFF BEZOS, 1997 LETTER TO SHAREHOLDERS

hate my clothes. Amazon’s interview instructions said to dress “nicely but comfortably—a suit and tie won’t impress anyone here.” But translating that into women’s wear is tricky,

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.

“I thought the dev’s job was to say either ‘yes, all looks good’ or to tell me up front why something needed to change.” It takes all I have not to add like a goddamn grown-up instead of a spoiled man-child.

I should have to charm him [like a motherfucking courtesan, I don’t add]

answer. “I would operate from the world as it is, not the world I want,” I say. I’m still angry. I just hope she can’t see it.

but I’m still back at the “kimono.” Is that what he said? What does it mean? It sounds not only creepy but vaguely racist and sexist, though of course that’s based purely on my intuition and not complex analysis.

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.)

Sixth grade. A boy I’ve never seen before pushes me against the wall in a deserted stairwell and shoves his hand down my corduroys. I push him away and go to the principal’s office to say what happened and the first question they ask in response is whether I have a hall pass.

“And that is because no one knows what is going on,” he says, looking right into my eyes. “This is the most important thing to understand about Amazon. No one knows jack shit.”

we’re renting a little Tudor house a few miles north of downtown in Ravenna,

My Amazon compensation is based on a salary just shy of six figures—no one in the company

makes more than $127,000 in straight salary, including Jeff Bezos—plus enough stock grants to add up to a competitive package.

The music industry in the early years of the twenty-first century is famously run by Men Who Don’t Get It, guys who are clinging to their shiny suits and gold coke spoons and old distribution models no matter what it costs them.

I’d hoped we might find them together, but I’m starting to grasp that “together” is not in the Amazon vocabulary.

30 a.m.: The beginning of the process of backing the Jetta out of the driveway. The house is on a busy street and it’s as if all the other drivers took a blood oath that I can go fuck myself.

00 a.m.: 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?

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.

used to say “person-hours” but everyone else says “man-hours” and I don’t want to stand out for the wrong reasons.

I’m one of just three women in a room of twenty people. It took me a couple of months to notice something lumpy about Amazon’s demographics.

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 wom...

And if it’s a meeting of developers and other tech employees, it’s a brofest at all levels. Both my ceiling ...

a meeting where management ranks all the employees in order of whom we’d keep on the aforementioned lifeboat in a dire, business-threatening situation and whom we’d throw overboard first.

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.

But if I stay silent now, at best I look weak. And if I look weak, I’m fucked. People will stop seeing me as someone who can make change happen. They won’t seek out my input on tough problems.

(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.)

“Jeff got an automated email about lube and he shut down marketing emails for the entire company!” “What?” I say. “I KNOW!” “Jeff did? And the lube? Lube-lube?”

and Calista, who normally goes to bed at nine and wakes around four, is apologizing for yawning.

Brent leaves for Apple and better work-life balance and boomerangs back when Apple’s work-life balance turns out to be even worse.

Take the Metro to Charles de Gaulle–Étoile, walk down streets of freakish architectural unity and beauty, and find the one building that looks like your dad’s first PC tower in 1985.

6:00 a.m.: I wake up afraid of the day, just because it’s there and I can’t stop it from happening.

to cancel out the calming bottle of wine I drank last night.

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.

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.

know after the Mitch debacle that I’ll be leaving his organization, not because I think he’ll push me out—he probably forgets I exist within days—but because a tiny spark inside says anyone who talks to me like that doesn’t deserve me on his team.

He doesn’t need to puff himself up, because no one’s invested in tearing him down.

Granted, that’s the Amazon way: promotions, most notoriously the one I’m in line for, are scarce and mysteriously granted, and still having a job counts as thanks.

“Gracias! Thank you!” the couple say, and head for one of the exits. The man glances back to confirm it’s the right one, and John nods vigorously and waves. “Obama!” the man says in farewell with a thumbs-up. “Obama!” we respond in unison.

At performance review time, 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.

The man is a poor fit for his job and impervious to my coaching and every time I see him I think about those forty thousand dollars.

2013: In a Payscale report ranking top tech companies on various attributes, Amazon falls near the bottom for median tenure (one year), pay, job satisfaction, and percentage of female employees (26 percent). But for “high work stress,” we’re outranked only by Tesla and SpaceX.

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.

Arthur, Bon Vivant 3, is on speaker from New York, and his main contribution is to warn us that if we on the West Coast don’t start paying bigger advances for high-profile books, we will fail as a business.

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.

newbie that some things will probably never change. “So, the thing about Amazon is that there are no wheels,” I say. “They were never there. What you’re experiencing is just how it is here. Absolute chaos.” “So how do you get anything done?” “With great difficulty, usually.”

What if airports had tiny private Amazon reading lounges rentable by the hour, with recliners and Keurigs and bitchy cats?

What if we turned one of our sci-fi books into a live-action role-play game involving, say, a million players around the globe?