Exit Interview

The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

By: Kristi Coulter

Narrated by: Kristi Coulter

Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

This program is read by the author.

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.

"A unique and brilliant book." —Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks

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 would come with it.

In no time she found 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.

Unsparing, absurd, and wickedly funny, Exit Interview is a rare journey inside the crucible that is Amazon. It is 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2023 Kristi Coulter (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"A unique and brilliant book—both a hilarious memoir of one woman's journey through the extremes of corporate America and a poignant and arresting account of what modern work culture can do to the soul. I found myself reading passages aloud to anyone who'd listen."—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks

"With wry humor, Coulter provides candid insights about life, love, and gender as well as surviving a toxic workplace."—Kirkus

“Kristi Coulter has given us the most vivid account yet of Amazon’s chaotic, mercurial, dignity-crushing office culture. Exit Interview is also a very funny and intensely personal depiction of what it’s like to be female in the oppressively male world of technology.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound

Touted as a book about women in tech, but ....

Coulter does talk a lot about the experience of a woman working in tech, but this book is about so much more. Also, the futility of the struggle that is corporate work. Also becoming a good German, and following orders. How mediocre managers ruin lives managing everything but people. Well worth the time.

Women, Wine, and Work

I read the author’s first book and loved it, which is also about women, work, and wine. It’s a smart documentary into the life of the ambitious working woman and why we all drink. I enjoyed it and the author is honest and witty.

A mirror of my own experiences

I’m thankful as a woman & Amazon employee that this book exists. Listening to this, I could feel so much of my own experience reflected in the ways she talked about being shuffled, meeting ever changing deadlines, and transforming herself into someone different to fit the culture while also never quite measuring up. Though this book is hyper focused on the Amazon experience, I think many women can probably relate to the feeling of trying to make yourself more digestible for others, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to any of my coworkers-workers or girlfriends grinding through corporate life.

Not Just an Amazon Story

I started listening to this account to better understand the culture of Amazon, the nature of assimilating to its corporate "hamster wheel" and, in the process, better support a dear friend who also courageously moved her family across the country to work for Amazon. I was awe before; my respect has only grown exponentially.

Little did I know that this memoir would also tell my professional story, as educator and counselor. The final chapter (and all others) drew me in, exposing how universal the Amazon experience is in reality.

This is a must-read! I laughed outloud many times and learned so much.

True, kind, smart

Embodied truth-telling. I feel more free within myself for having read-experienced Kristi’s story. This isn’t just a thing my intellect consumed, but the whole of me experienced.

Great Memoir

I’ll admit that I am slightly biased as a fellow Amazonian that didn’t know the author, but worked there during the same time frame. I truly loved listening to her memoir and learning about her experience as another person working in the same demanding, exhilarating, challenging and exhausting place. There are so many parallels to my own experience that at times I felt like she was in my own head, putting words to things I had observed along the way. She is an excellent story teller and I don’t think you need to have worked here to appreciate her experience and insights into the benefits and pitfalls of corporate tech. A great read!

Incredible, relatable, heart wrenching

Having spent my own years at Amazon, overlapping time with Kristi, but on my own journey, everything was recognizable. The experiences, the emotion, the self doubt, the growth, the fear, the drinking. It was cathartic to hear the experience so well captured. Relatable doesn’t describe the emotion I felt reliving my own experiences through Kristi’s amazing storytelling. Brilliant, fearless and bold are how I’d describe her book. Thank you.

Cathartic

Thank you for this book. As a woman that did 3 years at Amazon, it put into words many of the emotions and struggles I went thru trying to succeed in that peculiar work place.

Amazing work of Art

I enjoyed her voice on so many levels. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say next.

Phenomenal Story of Amazon Culture

The writing poetically captures the emotion of working for Amazon, and especially what it is like to be a woman in any type of leadership role so elegantly. It’s so hard for any woman to speak on the bullshit of sexism and sexual harassment because almost any response she is bound to get from anyone who doesn’t directly see it is that she is full of crap or exaggerating, but Kristi manages to express the exhaustion in a matter-of-fact way with confidence not sounding bitchy or dramatic, even though this is an issue that deserves unending bitchiness.

I didn’t realize it was as bad to work at Amazon in Seattle as it was in the warehouses but I had suspicion. Personally, I worked in two different warehouses over 2 years in HR and safety for a staffing agency on site. We were modeled after Amazon, so we had reorgs and crazy demands that this book made me feel like I was reliving. I know it sounds bad, but I did not realize there were any issues with our employee working conditions (this was 8 or so years ago and before my gender transition). I just saw people as lazy and incompetent if they couldn’t hack it. Even when there were pretty severe injuries or health issues, I just wondered why those people would choose to work there in the first place, never questioning once that there was anything wrong with cutting the bottom 10% of people every week, week in and week out, or that perhaps working 10 hour shifts 6 days a week repeating the same tasks over and over again at maximum performance with fear of termination if you need to take more than 5 minutes in the bathroom once in a shift might be unreasonable for anything other than a machine. The kicker to that is that in the robotic facility I worked at in Connecticut, the robots crashed just days before the heaviest of Christmas peak due to being pushed beyond capacity.

It’s crazy what you can normalize when you have such a small scope with a million things to do and no time to do them within such a conglomerate. Kristi really does a wonderful job capturing the frustrations of day to day life at Amazon, as well as how Amazon really is unlike any other employer on Earth.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read her next book.