Exit Interview Quotes

“You try so hard to be good at things you don’t actually want to do. You never ask yourself if maybe you should just stop doing them.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“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 these interviews the man pronounced me “impressive” and gave me a job and the prophecy came true. I never let him down.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I start to worry I’ve become the thing Calista once warned me about: someone who wants a promotion too much. “They can smell it on you, and if they can smell it, they won’t give it to you,” she said. “It’s not fair, but it’s true.” I need to pretend that external recognition is just a cute little extra bonus and that consistently delivering world-changing greatness for Amazon’s benefit is its own intrinsic reward. But everyone I know here is trying to get promoted. True, most of us grew up as hyper-achievers. 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.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“My family had two settings: Everything Is Fine, and Screaming Fights with Lasting Damage.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“…for now I float in a sea of undifferentiated information and pray no one asks me something I should know, but don’t. That’s how I feel for weeks on end, actually, only I’m not floating on the water, I’ve been shot from a cannon to the bottom of the sea and have to make my way back to the surface, mostly unassisted, and weighted down by salt and seaweed, by figuring out which starfish and shells and old cannonballs I need, and how they fit together. It’s not that I’m being hazed, my coworkers are kind and helpful, but they are above the surface, so to reach one I have to stretch my arm up blindly and hope I’m grabbing at the right person, and that they have time to come hang with me under the sea. And even when they do, I can tell from their eyes that they don’t really have time. That every minute spent orienting me is one where something else might be blowing up, just out of sight. And Arjun is right, everyone here is operating on partial information, no one really knows what the fuck is going on.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I never fail, because I never take on anything I’m truly unsure I can handle; even when it looks as if I were stretching myself, I keep a secret 10 percent in reserve. So if I take this job and I blow it, will it mean I destroyed myself out of hubris, and deserve whatever misery comes my way?”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Maybe it’s the innate male confidence that eats at me. He doesn’t need to puff himself up, because no one’s invested in tearing him down.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“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.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Nice as it is to feel like the favorite, I don’t want to talk smack about my colleagues with our boss. Also, the hard truth is that saying yes to every outlandish request is Amazonian. It may be ruinous and unsustainable, but Amazon as we know it wouldn’t exist without a thousand tiny acts of self-destruction every day.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Dan,” I say, “my feedback is related to a situation in this room, not the simulation. The behavior is that you joked several times about being sexually harassed or accused of sexual harassment. They were lighthearted-sounding jokes and I didn’t sense any malice behind them.” I know that if I don’t absolve him of evil intent up front, he might not listen at all. “But being harassed on the job is a common experience for women. I’ve been sexually harassed and it’s made it harder to do my job. So one impact is that I felt alienated by the repeated jokes.” So far, so good. Now for the kicker. “Also, it’s easy to unconsciously assume other people have had similar life experiences. But if that assumption alienates your employees and co-workers, their mistrust could weaken your effectiveness as a leader.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“A handful of Salesforce licenses would actually be life changing, we realize, but the dev team balks: We wouldn’t be able to modify the code to add new features. That’s okay, we say, Salesforce has all we need. But what if someday we need a new feature they don’t support? Like what? That’s the point! We don’t know! It could be anything! What we do know is we’re drowning now, we say, and making stupid errors. But what if Salesforce steals the data from us and uses it for their own benefit? This fatal case of Not Invented Here Syndrome goes on for weeks, until we blink first. We’d be fine with one built internally, we say, but the dev team balks: Our road map is full. The idea’s not a game changer. Coders don’t get promoted for projects that simple. Two years pass and nothing changes.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I 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.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Kristi, just say it,” she said. “You know what needs to happen. You don’t need math. Take a commonsense stand.” I was too embarrassed to tell her, but that was the first time in my Amazon career that anyone had ever told me to just trust my common sense. I hadn’t quite known it was allowed.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“For the first time, Amazon starts to seem like a place where I might thrive. Yes, Calista can be a bit intense, but she’s also a lot of fun, and she treats me like an entire person, not just a set of responsibilities.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“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, and Amazon seems to like crossing it just because it can.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“It takes a while to figure this place out,” he says, and I laugh because uh, yeah. “It’s just interesting,” I say. “Because 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.” George’s tight, angry smile is back. “Welcome to Amazon,” he says.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I try to see him through the eyes of one of the newer VPs, or a Facebook friend who thinks he should be in jail for unspecified crimes. I know he’s wealthy to a degree I can’t even conceptualize. I know his company runs on fear and superhuman expectations. I know he’s the architect of practices that have harmed a lot of people and that he has done almost nothing with his unfathomable wealth to mitigate that harm. And yet I’ve been here too long to see him as the planet-owning villain or ominous cartoon character the world at large does. He’s just the guy who runs this company and has made some decisions I support and an increasingly large number that I don’t.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“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.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I also think about what to say in the exit interview. I know not everyone gets invited to do one in person, that a lot of employees just get a form to fill out. But I’m in the ninety-eighth fucking percentile. I’ve worked across five different organizations and had a hand in hiring many hundreds of people. Plus I’m a woman in leadership, that population Amazon keeps saying it’s trying to grow. Of course I’ll get a real exit interview, right?”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“And just so we’re clear: if gender discrimination did exist at Amazon, Nick would be leading the charge against it, because he is—yes—the father of a daughter. But it doesn’t, because it can’t, because science.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Arthur is twinkly and avuncular and calls me brilliant and inspiring and other things the lonely daughter inside me is dying to hear.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“Yessssss. I-5 is backed up, a secret relief. It means more time to prepare myself for the maelstrom, not to mention to enjoy the BMW John surprised me with on my birthday last year. I’ve always appreciated a nice car, but I was never a car person until I drove this one for the first time. Maybe this is how it feels when a woman who never cared much for babies meets her baby and falls in love at first sight. It’s just so heavy and solid and safe, like having a really good dad.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“There’s a saying in tech that some people are builders and some are operators.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“I love playing a board game called What Shall I Be? 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.)”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

“At AMG and in my liberal arts background, ambition is considered uncool and even a little embarrassing. I’m supposed to see work as a necessary evil. But I can’t help it. I like to work, and I want my work to leave a wake.”
― Kristi Coulter, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career