Exit Interview is Kristi Coulter's memoir of her 10 years at Amazon. The title of the Chinese translation of this book translates back into English as "I spent 10 years at Amazon and needed alcohol and a psycho-therapist." Clearly, the Chinese translation could save you a ton of time reading!
In all seriousness, the book traces her abandonment of a quiet Michigan career in a company where not much was happening, through her interview loop at Amazon, which led to her being the senior manager of the merchandising team. In 10 years, she'd managed to go from that to managing the Amazon Crossings (translation) imprint, to being part of the management training program to running the ill-fated Amazon Go's writing team.
The book has several themes, one is that the internal corporate culture of Amazon is just as dysfunctional (or functional) as any other tech corporation on the planet, but if you're coming from outside tech it feels like an alien culture, especially to someone who basically went to school in the humanities. The second, of course, is being a woman at Amazon is difficult. How difficult compared to other tech companies? You couldn't tell, because Amazon was the only tech company she ever worked for so she had no frame of reference. For instance, at one point she talked to her manager about getting a promotion to Director. His response, "When you change the world, you'll get a promotion." She took it as a denial or lack of support. In the unlikely event that a man would come to me for advice, I'd tell him to switch jobs. But of course, a job switch at that point would have cost her multiple millions in valuable stock, so she stuck around. That's the kind of career trade-off anyone at FANG has to do continuously, so it came off as unsurprising.
There's also a sense of total hostility towards Amazon whenever she has to meet or talk to people outside Amazon. For instance, in the publishing industry, Amazon is treated as the outsider who wants to eat everyone else's lunch. Her internal dialogue is, "We're just this tiny experimental outfit inside Amazon that can get shut down any time now, why are you treating us as a behemoth?" This strikes me as a little disingenuous, since Amazon clearly had a larger market cap than any single publisher and also owns the biggest bookstore on the planet:
Amazon Crossing recently became the world’s largest publisher of literature in translation. If you think that must mean we published hundreds of translated books, ha-ha, no. Fewer than 3 percent of books in English are translations from other languages, so we became the industry leader with a list of just twenty-nine. Naturally, people are mad about it. (page 208)
When I talk to tech people they always "forget to count that low." Many are always surprised that all it takes is to sell 10,000 copies of a book in a month to show up on the New York Times best seller list.
Finally, the narrative has lots of gaps. There's no description of any single event that drove her to alcoholism. That's probably because she's beholden to an NDA or maybe even a non-disparagement agreement. But of course, there's no explanation. You have to treat this as "creative non-fiction" (which is a genre all in itself)
In any case, I enjoyed the book --- the author's voice is fun to read, but I can't help but take it all with a large dose of skepticism.
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