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PRODUCT
Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
Product Description:
Price:
$2,949.00
Detailed description:
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.
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Product group:
Categories: Women Writers
Product name:
Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career
Price:
$2,949.00
Beth O’Donnell –
I loved this book for several reasons. Kristi’s writing style is engaging. She also does not portray herself as a victim; rather she shares how easy it is to get sucked into the competitive culture, golden handcuffs, and the desire to do epic stuff that drives the tech culture.
I also felt heard and validated as she shared some of her experiences as a female in the tech industry. Her memoir is highly relatable and so authentic that I felt like I was laughing with her, crying with her, stressing out with her and evolving with her.
I high recommend Exit Interview for any one and everyone especially those who are struggling with jobs that are consuming every facet of your life. Good lessons in this one.
Brian Ballantyne –
I hope this book was as therapeutic to write as it was to read. A cautionary tale about the vicious flywheel of Withheld Recognition High Achievement. Thank you Kristi for sharing your Amazon story!
Downeast –
I guess it’s mostly that life doesn’t really follow a satisfying narrative, but I kept waiting for her to finally say “screw this, I’m out” in some kind of emphatic fashion and instead she just keeps going back in a different role. Okay, fine. But at some point, you’ve made your choices and not even pushing back on Bezo’s shocking defense of the male domination in management statistics (some kind of BS given the company’s purported belief in data above all else) was…disappointing?
Hey, gotta eat and everyone has a price. Understood. But it’s clear she got rich from this, so it’s tough to feel too much empathy.
BoyzMom –
My careers have spanned government to PR to Higher Education – never tech or a start-up – but Kristi tells my story in this book. The people pleasing; the oversized sense of responsibility for everyone and everything; the “am I invisible or did I just say that?” feeling of watching someone else (usually male) say what I’ve just said to exclamations of awe in a meeting; the working flat-out pace with the optimism that someone will surely see my effort, dedication, and results and reward me accordingly – which never happens.
Kristi so captures the hamster-on-the-wheel effect of working hard and getting nothing but more work as your reward, of wondering why it’s Groundhog Day of facing the same issues and throwing the same resources at it while nothing changes, of continuing to hope that people will step up as managers and your workplace will 1)see your value and 2)change the way it operates to embrace common sense.
Sometimes I just laughed out loud. Other times I gasped at the sh%# rolling off of people’s tongues in the workplace. With every chapter, I was cheering for Kristi. That she would sell her house, take care of her fractured leg, stand up for her value, speak her truth, and all the while she was telling the stories of so many of us. And she does. Her dreams of being a published author – incredibly exciting. Her lived experience of sobriety and the peace of mind that comes with that decision – amazing. I’m sharing this book with my students, my friends, and my sons. It’s SO good.
Anna hutkins –
Basically change Amazon to Old Navy and I could have written this myself. The author does a great job of trying to explain what happens when you are working your way up the corporate ladder.
Pablo Hewson –
…it’s otherwise held back by its constant, constant, ever so constant man-hating. Otherwise it’s fantastic and should be read by anyone in the corporate world.
Anonymous –
My daughter picked this book up and it looked interesting, so I decided to read it and could not put it down. Just love the author’s writing style, humor, wit, honesty. As I had a relative that worked at Amazon and almost lost his mind, everything rang true from my perspective.
Fantastic read and I look forward to many more books from this author.
Brian Ballantyne –
Good book
Gianna –
Disclaimer: I am a former Amazonian and colleague of Kristi’s.
I started the book over morning coffee and ended up willingly losing the whole day to it. Kristi expertly captured so many complex feelings about her time at Amazon: the excitement, the lunacy, the pride, the infuriation, the debilitating self-doubt, how ambition can bloom “like neon ink in water” (god I love that imagery)…and so many other things I would never be able to articulate myself, but I could understand and/or identify with. She did this so well at times it brought me right back to those conference rooms – at Amazon and throughout my career. At other times it felt like the liberating feeling of having drinks with only female colleagues and the freedom of speaking filter-free. Kristi tells this story through her lens (never claiming it’s anyone else’s), and I thoroughly enjoyed looking through it. Laugh-out-loud funny, touching, and at times uncomfortably and painfully easy to identify with, Exit Interview provides a rich, insightful, and above all an expertly crafted and entertaining memoir. I wanted to stay in her brain and see how she reasoned through it all and answered the question I’m sure many readers are asking (“why did she stay so long?!!?”). And I love Kristi’s matter-of-fact approach to that question, told with vulnerability and charm. She skillfully and unapologetically tells her story, and so much of it spoke to me. The author is brave, talented, brutally honest, and funny as hell. I listened to the audio book (I generally do when the author reads – I want to hear how they read the sentences they wrote). Kristi does an expert job at narration, and hearing her reading makes it even better – recommended.