Reviews

Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career by Kristi Coulter

Only show reviews with written explanations

jcstokes95's review against another edition

informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

This is a book about me! Just kidding, but I found the first third of this book uber compelling because I literally have the same job as the author. Except I work in co-op side marketing, but there were sentences in the first part of this book, that I have literally said within the last week. Like one of her coworkers would say something, and I’d be like “damn straight”. Anyway, tech marketing killed my brain. The bad news is it killed Kristi Coulter’s too! Sorry Kristi!

We follow Kristi up the ranks at a little site called Amazon.com and their various efforts to take over the whole universe or whatever. You can roll your eyes, but if you’re reading this on Goodreads, gird you loins, sweetie! They walk among us!

I must admit, a huge portion of my enjoyment was how much this book mirrored back my own experiences in tech marketing (at a normal company). The little things resonated; the ways she is overlooked as a woman even though there are rarely direct comments on it. The never-ending tightrope of how to be assertive without feeling social (and potentially financial) repercussions. The whirling amount of anxiety in a male-dominated business that has no understanding of that personality type. In so many ways, I felt like a small fry version of Kristi and her concerns about the world.

Except not, because that would be horrifying! Because by the halfway point I realized….Kristi…is a bad guy. I don’t know if that’s the common reading here, but my sympathy only extended to a certain point. And maybe the most interesting question this work memoir raises is, at what point does the cog become the machine. To me, there are clear times when she encourages the terrible culture. For me, one clear turning point was the night in which she essentially does nothing to stop rich, drunk authors exerting their power over much younger book agents, making them feel incredibly uncomfortable in their workplace. She can say other higher ups told her not to intervene. But Kristi, you’re an adult woman. I have an angelic, darling Gen Z colleague, and if anyone said anything mean to her, I’d rip their face off. Regardless of what my manager wanted me to do! (though, again, my company is a nice place and our manager would also probably face rip with us).

I felt by the later stages of her career, I could not fully understand her complicity in what I see as a fundamentally evil corporation. I feel she knows that Amazon is evil, but at every turn her editorializing, she minimizes their bad deeds. Because of this, I feel the whole memoir lacks the space for true self-reflection. While it entertains, and can be relatable to my fellow tech drones, it doesn’t dig deep enough to reach its full potential. And it makes me worry that the author has not yet hit at the core of the problem. She writes about the symptoms and not the real germy cause, but luckily, she is a skilled writer and deeply entertaining so I came away still mostly positively.