I absolutely love Kristi Coulter's writing so I was thrilled to see a new book from her. It did not disappoint! Coulter describes her experience working for Amazon but rather than just a journal of her work experience, she makes it a fascinating look into a truly hidden world. Told with humor, I appreciated her feminist take on what it's like to work in the tech world. I only wish it had been longer!

This was an interesting behind the scenes look into Amazon written by a female ex-employee. I honestly always thought that working at Amazon was similar to working at Google or a start-up, but I was definitely wrong. While Amazon is so large that it seems to have an unlimited number of job opportunities, it doesn't mean that it's an ideal place work - especially for women. I'm highly surprised at the mostly male, boys-club type environment. At parts, Coulter's book was brilliant and at other parts, I found it tedious and hard to follow all of the various characters. A must read for someone who wants to learn all about the ins and outs of Amazon.

This is a beautifully written memoir of a difficult and often frustrating company to work for. The author’s description of working at Amazon is so wildly accurate - other former employees will be reigniting conversations about it with their therapists (but in a cathartic way). As someone who sat a few door desks down from the happenings of many of these chapters, I found the depictions to be accurate, fair — and most of all — strangely comforting and validating. A must for any current or former Amazon corporate employee.

Thank you #Netgalley for the advanced copy!

I really enjoyed this book! Kristi was one of the early amazon employees who moved to Seattle to help build out this company. And it was not what she expected! First the initial office, the lack of space, the chaos, the rapid growth and so much more. I found it very interesting to learn about the early culture and the management style and ultimately the progression of the management tract. Kristi ties in funny stories, her personal life in addition to the growth of Amazon. I appreciated that she continued to find her path and try different jobs but also recognizing that your job is not your life, you have to set boundaries.

Great cover and title! Coulter's book is a wild ride to read! I was laughing and then shaking my head at times. The things women do for their careers and what they go through is explored. It was also shocking to read about Amazon! Well done. Five stars. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

The cover and blurb were enough to draw me to Kristi Coulter’s memoir, and her humour, great writing, and relatability brought me to the finish line.

Exit Interview starts out in 2006, when Coulter is thirty-five, and after a seven-year stint with AMG in Michigan, she’s had enough of the hypermasculinity and path to nowhere, and accepts an offer to work with Amazon in Seattle.

When she arrives, it’s a crash landing, which Coulter assumes is just the onboarding phase. She hears the words, “drinking from the fire hose” used to describe what others are going through during their first few weeks, however it feel like this never ends for her as she hops from role to role, city to city, pedalling Amazon products in one way or another.

It was fascinating to read about the Amazon of the early aughts, Coulter’s interactions with Jeff Bezos, the incredible scope of projects she was involved in, and how long she actually lasted.

Amazon is no stranger to toxic workplace complaints, nor to passing over women for leadership roles and promotions, as Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld reported for the New York Times in 2015, it did not have a single woman on its top leadership team.

Coulter covers these issues, the gender wage gap, sexual harassment, and Amazon’s toxic work culture, however she always returns to her own personal story, her path to sobriety, and rediscovering her passion for creative writing.

She grapples with the push-pull aspect that many of us feel in a job we do that takes over our lives, whether we do it for the money, the feeling that it might take us somewhere if we just wait it out a little longer, even if we’re not sure of the exact path. Coulter talks about fear, failure, and imposter syndrome. And then one day she finds the words: I don’t actually care, and I cheered her on every time she said it.

This was a fantastic workplace memoir.

Synopsis
*********
A candid, intensely funny memoir of ambition, gender, and a grueling decade inside Amazon.com, from the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This. What would you sacrifice for your career? All your free time? Your sense of self-worth? Your sanity?
In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that came with it. In no time she finds the challenge and excitement she'd been craving—along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options, proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed—until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.

Oooooh what a book! I’ve heard a lot about working at Amazon but this is rough and soul crushing stuff. Think your job sucks? Check out what this poor woman went through! Utterly fascinating and engrossing I will recommend this book far and wide.


Unsparing, absurd, and wickedly funny, Exit Interview is a rare journey inside the crucible that is Amazon. An intimate, surprisingly relatable look at the work life of a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.

It's not always easy to root for someone who's biggest problem in life seems to be their job, when they have the financial means to just walk away from it. But Exit Interview is really about two things: Amazon, and why on Earth the author Kristi Coulter kept working there for over a decade. It seems like she's trying to figure that out herself through writing this. It's more than one answer - sometimes she wanted career progression, sometimes she enjoyed being able to buy expensive shoes, sometimes her lifelong need for achievement made her push herself beyond all reasonable limits to avoid feeling like a failure, sometimes she became too brainwashed to believe anywhere else would hire her, sometimes she thought she was on the brink of a promotion, and sometimes she loved what she was doing.

As she writes in the intro "Most improbable of all is when I say parts of it were astounding and fun, that for twelve years Amazon supplied me with high-grade lunacy I didn't know I needed until I touched it and my ambition bloomed like neon ink in water. 'That doesn't sound fun', the faces say, or 'that shouldn't have been fun'. To which my only possible response is, I'm not telling you what was right or good, I'm telling you what went down and how it felt."

Still, throughout most of the book, you're likely rooting for her to quit, or wondering why she won't. There's plenty of caveats you can throw out there in defense of Amazon. Yes, I read this book on a Kindle and am writing a review on Goodreads, so we can acknowledge the enormous impact this company has on so many people's day to day lives. Yes, Amazon has over a million employees and it's not one monolithic entity where only one experience is possible. Yes, things like constant re-orgs, teams asking for way too much from other teams with no notice, rampant sexism, and work stress driving people to drinking problems are not unique to Amazon. But the book certainly paints a picture of this corporate culture, where it's not hard to see how an executive would feel totally comfortable telling someone they're stupid in a meeting, or think they're being a hero for telling employees they should feel free to leave at 5:30 PM on a Friday a few times a year to hang out with their families, or where there would be an enormous gender imbalance in leadership, or where drivers pee in bottles, or all the other damning things that have been covered in the media for years.

Some of my favorite excerpts -

"But what's too hard to explain to (friends or family) is that we don't feel overpaid. Amazon could be depositing a million dollars a month into my checking account and I would think, 'Yes this seems about right, given the fear, and the chaos, and the ugly surroundings and the endlessly escalating demands and the way no one ever says thanks".

"True, most of us grew up 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."

"When I tell her I feel as if I were failing to get my arms around the job", she says, 'That's because the job is like sand falling through your fingers'".

"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."

"It says right up front that the bar for being a Level 8 is 'nearly superhuman talent and stamina'".

"It's all (NY) Times (article) talk, a largely dude-to-dude conversation that breaks down as 50 percent: "I have never personally witnessed these things, and therefore they cannot have happened, because I somehow made it to adulthood without understanding that my reality is not the only reality.""

"this entire company is built on the fear of being exposed as merely human."

"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 the 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 really makes them think. They wish they had more time to read."

The depictions of sexism in this book deserve special mention as well, not as being an Amazon-specific problem, but just as a pervasive theme of the book that was really well-done. It would be easy to say "this should be required reading about workplace sexism", but the people who would learn the most from it are the ones who will instinctively never read a word and instead feverishly write up their refutations of sexism existing at all,


Note - I received an advanced reading copy of this book from Netgalley

I loved this memoir. Kristi Coulter works at Amazon for more than a decades and brings us along her experience as being one of the few leaders there. She brought great insight into Amazon’s brutal culture. It was frustrating but important to see how hard it can be to be a woman in leadership. I think this book has the opportunity to help break glass ceilings and hopes of change for the future. I hope leaders at Amazon and others around the world, read this and make changes for our future.