Exit Interview

The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career

De: Kristi Coulter

Narrado por: Kristi Coulter

Duración: 10 h y 48 m

Resumen del Editor

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

"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.

An Incredible, Relatable Experience

Kristi Coulter did an amazing job capturing the absurdity, the intensity, and the sheer anger that women coming up through startups and big tech have to endure. As someone who went through similar experiences at a Amazon-like company, her words (and the artful way she told her story with both realism and absurdism) cut me deep and made my cry, laugh, and wince in turns.

Loved this book so much!

There’s no place quite like Amazon

Pretty accurate depiction of Amazon, at least based on my ~10 years there: equally thrilling and frustrating. Had a number of PTSD moments listening to this audiobook but I’m glad I stuck with it to hear Kristi’s whole story.

Great, great, great

So well written and applicable. Listening to this book adds a step to my ongoing journey toward lowering similarly-acquired cortisol.

The therapy I didn’t realize I needed

I thought I would maybe find one or two things that I would relate to but ended up wondering if I was actually Kristi Coulter and if I wrote this book. Everything she went through sounded familiar. I cried, I laughed, and more importantly, I was able to commiserate and finally lick my wounds. I mean, as much as I could hearing that someone else also suffered and made it to the other side. I guess we both worked hard and made history.

A Feast of a Book

Once the story began, I was hooked! I devoured every bit of it. It is not just a singular story about one woman’s experience at Amazon; it speaks to generations of women, hacking their uncharted paths through this world. It is a story of hunger, desire, trauma, love, compassion, and understanding. It is the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Well done and please keep writing!

Nailed the Amazon experience

At Amazon, I found sobriety. I’m a better leader for reading. Thanks Kristi for forcing me to think introspectively and readdress some of my own flaws.

Relatable as a woman in tech

Love the story, but some chapters are doubled apparently. I heard three times the part about tips on how to be a woman at work, is this on purpose?