Kristi Coulter spent 12 years at Amazon and writes about the experience in her latest book, Exit Interview.
[Editor's Note: We're excited this week to welcome a guest host to the GeekWire Podcast, Ross Reynolds, whose voice is well-known in the Seattle region from his 34 years at KUOW, the public radio station from which he retired in 2021. He's joined by a special guest for a look behind the scenes at work and life inside Amazon.]
Kristi Coulter's latest book is Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career. It's a memoir about what she learned in her 12 years at Amazon about work, gender bias, and herself. Exit Interview is Coulter's second book. Her first, Nothing Good Can Come From This, is a collection of essays about quitting drinking. As you'll learn from this podcast conversation, it intersects with her Amazon career.
Listen below, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Continue reading for excerpts from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Ross Reynolds: I really enjoyed the book tremendously. I realized I didn't know anyone from Amazon at the high level that you were, so I've never been able to have this conversation even though I've lived in Seattle for 30 years.
Kristi Coulter: Right. People don't talk, either.
Ross Reynolds: OK. It's not my fault.
Kristi Coulter: No, it's certainly not entirely your fault, but people from Amazon have been very closed-mouthed about the place.
Ross Reynolds: Why?
Kristi Coulter: I think part of it is just general discretion. You don't want to spill, tell how the algorithms work or something, but also I think there's a certain amount of fear. It's actually been interesting to me in the past three or four years to see things start to leak out of Amazon pretty routinely. I don't remember ever hearing about a document leaking to the press in my 12 years there. It probably happened at some point, but now it seems to happen routinely, video footage, documents, all kinds of stuff. ....
Ross Reynolds: The impact of Amazon is what drew you to want to work there, but you had a career before that. What got you to Amazon?
Kristi Coulter: I had a really nifty job at an early internet company called the All Music Guide, which was basically a database of every record on Earth. ... I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I had run out of runway in my career. It was just too small a place for me to go any further. And I was really tired of the winters. Weather has often been a motivating force for me. And I thought, "I'm going to have to leave here to go further in my career" because Ann Arbor, it's a university town. There's just not the kind of stuff I was looking for.
And so I applied to Amazon on a whim because my husband has family out here, and I thought, "Well, I'll get my resume polished. This won't go anywhere." They called me within two hours. I was here interviewing a few days later, less than a week later, and I recognized it as my chance to make a big change in my life. I was 35 or about to turn 36. Felt like I was stuck and life might be over, which seems hilarious now to think that at 35, but I was like, "This is my chance. Let's do it." ...
Ross Reynolds: What were you hired to do at Amazon, and what were your first impressions when you came here [in 2006] and walked in the door for those first days?
Kristi Coulter: I was hired to run merchandising, so basically onsite marketing for the books and media stores, so for five different storefronts, and especially hired to make it a better job. They had an incredibly outdated tool set. I mean, the tools were almost non-functional. They broke all the time. People were really miserable. They had been hired as editors, and the job had then shifted to something where their opinions and their knowledge didn't matter. It was more about just scheduling content. So that was my job. And when I walked in, my first impression was just the chaos. I expected Amazon to be a well-oiled machine, and it was just so chaotic.
Ross Reynolds: What were the signatures of the chaos?
Kristi Coulter: Just people barely able to take five seconds to say hello to me. Really, no ramp up. I interviewed someone the day I arrived. They put me on an interview loop.
Ross Reynolds: To hire someone else?
Kristi Coulter: To hire someone else. I was like, "Don't do that." And I was like, "Okay, I'll go along with it." My first boss, who was a very nice guy, had basically no time for me. I mean, I probably had, I don't know, five or six one-on-ones with him and my first six months. So it was just like, "Just figure it out." And just basically, they give you a list of names of people to talk to and you just do it. So I was on shuttle buses, shuttling all over downtown Seattle, trying to basically put together a jigsaw puzzle.
Ross Reynolds: But you were successful. I mean, you were there for a dozen years. You moved up the ranks.
Kristi Coulter: Well, technically I never moved up. I was never promoted, which became a big sticking point for me. I came in as a level seven. Amazon has twelve levels or something, and I stayed a level seven, but I did get bigger and bigger jobs. And I think it happened first because it was a small enough company that people could see, including people very high up, that I came in and just started to get it together. They could dump me in there, and I was like, "Well, I'll figure out how to survive here," because failing was not something I considered an option. And I think I just developed that reputation as someone who could just figure stuff out and delivered some results and people would kind of tap me on the shoulder for various jobs. It also really helped that I came from a liberal arts background.
Ross Reynolds: Really? Why is that?
Kristi Coulter: Because Amazon needed someone who understood language and writing and voice. And they were never really going to hire for that because they, certainly at the time, didn't want to believe they needed it, but they did. And once I was there, it became apparent that I could help. I could the site to have a voice again. I could help the merchandisers to actually write better. And so there were a few very smart executives there who were like, "Well, while she's here, let's use this."
Ross Reynolds: So what was the most difficult thing about working at Amazon? What was the biggest challenge for you? And was it the same challenge for everyone there, do you think, or was it particular to you?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah, it's just a really punitive environment. It's a culture where there's not really much of a thank you. You are basically always focused on what you could have done better to the exclusion of what went well. The culture kind of runs on fear. Everyone I knew at Amazon was some level of afraid, from paralyzingly afraid to just a little bit low-level, I've learned to live with this afraid, but it's brutal in that way.
Ross Reynolds: Is that a good thing in some ways, to be a little bit on edge?
Kristi Coulter: I think to be a little bit on edge is fine. And feel like you're taking risks and things. ... In one of the articles on Amazon, someone said, "It's where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves," which I was like, yes, indeed. And I think that it gets to a point where you're just grinding people down. And I don't actually know that people do their best work when they're feeling really afraid. You know what I mean? You're just thinking about survival then.
Ross Reynolds: Well, you write about stacked ranking, and that's something that would make you really afraid. For people not familiar with it, they basically rank everybody in the department, and the bottom 10% get fired. That's end of story. I understand Amazon has denied doing this. But in your book, you say they totally did this, right?
Kristi Coulter: Oh, yeah. A couple of years ago, I was reading an article and they denied ever having done stack ranking, and I was just stunned because I participated in that exercise three or four times in my career there. And yeah, you get in and you rank everyone, and that bottom 10%, they're not fired right then, but they get a very strong message, as we would put it back then, that they needed to improve. And some of those people really did. There were people where you were like, oh yeah, this person's probably got to go, but there were also people who ended up in that 10% just because they were solid, but more limited in what they could go on to do. And at some point, throwing those people out is just really self-defeating because not everybody needs to be the quarterback. Not everybody needs to be a rock star. You also need people who are not trying to take over the world, but who are really good at their jobs.
Ross Reynolds: You talk about lack of appreciation, but you also talk about some incidents where people said things to you in meetings that were devastating to you. Could you talk a little bit about those experiences?
Kristi Coulter: I think the worst experience I had in a meeting was, I had sold a pretty ambitious plan to transform the merchandising role to the VPs and Senior VP Jeff Wilke in North America. They were very enthusiastic about it. And I went to the International VP [a different executive] to get his buy-in. And he read the doc — the famous thing where people sit in a room and read the doc — really fast. He read it too fast. And I thought, 'Ooh, this is either really good or really bad.' And I said, "So, any feedback?" And he said, "Yes, it's stupid." Just full stop. And I was like, "OK ... can you tell me something more specific about that?" And [he said], "It's just stupid."
Ross Reynolds: Where do you go with that?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. What do you do with that? One of an executive's biggest roles is to teach. ... That's not how you teach someone. And eventually, he actually denied that the other VPs could have possibly read it. He basically said, Jeff Wilke, junior only to Jeff Bezos, "Oh, he didn't read it. He just said he did. Because if he'd read it, he would think it was stupid, too." ...
He said this whole room full of alpha males, who are not exactly used to coddling anyone, they all must have been lying. And then he said I was stupid. ... I was like, do I throw down, or do I cry? What do I do? And I just tried to just get out of the room without crying, basically. Just very difficult. But yeah, that was probably the worst. It was a direct attack on me. And even worse, it was this grown man with immense power and knowledge just throwing a tantrum.
Ross Reynolds: I'm a big fan of this podcast called Battle Tactics For Your Sexist Workplace. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking about that. Would that executive have said that to a man?
Kristi Coulter: Probably, honestly. Maybe worse. Most people I worked with at Amazon were, at least on the surface, respectful, but there were a few folks ... It's funny, I had a conversation with a friend, an ex-Amazon friend yesterday who said this same guy once yelled at her on a conference call for two hours. I haven't heard the same stories about him treating men that way, but men got treated pretty badly at Amazon, too.
Ross Reynolds: Was that ever an issue where you thought, I need to raise this gender bias issue?
Kristi Coulter: Who would you have told? ... Part of it is that Amazon is so intent, or the system is so intent on having you blame yourself for all of your problems, that I thought, oh, it's just me. If I were a different kind of woman, I could handle this better. I'd rise above. Also, as a Gen X-er, that's how I was raised. Nothing can stop you but yourself, which is not really true, it turns out. But also, there was such a denial of any gender bias at Amazon. People were not even willing to entertain the idea. It would've been kind of suicidal to make a big deal out of it.
Ross Reynolds: There's just been a class action suit against Amazon for gender issues. What's your comment on that, since your book delves into that quite a bit?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah, it's been interesting. The suit is about huge pay gaps between women in one part of the organization and a man who was at their level, but making [150%] more a year for the same job. Amazon's comp, like a lot of tech companies' comp, is really complicated, no pun intended. When you started really affects your base and the stock. I suspect that it could turn out that there's a non-sexist explanation for the pure comp issues, not that that makes it right, but the women were classified as marketing project managers, and the man was classified as a research scientist, despite the fact that they all were research scientists. And I think that's really interesting. That drove a lot of the pay difference. And the most interesting thing about the suit is that there was direct retaliation when the women reported it. They went to HR looking for explanations. And one woman who was up for promotion was told that because she had complained, they didn't feel she was ready for promotion anymore. That's the big thing for me.
[Editor's Note: Read the full text of the lawsuit here. Amazon has denied the allegations in the suit, and said it doesn't tolerate workplace discrimination.]
Ross Reynolds: Did you experience that? Was your job description different than men's job descriptions who were giving paid more than you?
Kristi Coulter: It's always hard to know because you're not supposed to talk about comp, but I did have a time when a man who reported to me was making $60,000 more than I was, despite being a level lower than I was. And I was like, well, this is odd. And I went to HR and just said, "What's going on?" And nobody was ever able to give me an explanation. And they were like, "Well, it could be a lot of things." And they also made me feel a little bit gauche for asking. There's this sense of, "Well, I mean if you want to keep trying to find out, you can, but ... "
Ross Reynolds: Can you be a party to the class action suit even though you don't work there anymore?
Kristi Coulter: No. It's just three women right now, but they wanted to cover all women from 2016 to '20 or something in certain jobs. I don't think I would be a party to it, but I think it could be a nice forcing function to bring some of this stuff out in the light. There was also some data in it about the man who managed all these women taking women's names off of documents he was presenting, even though they had written the documents or co-written them. Just some really bad stuff.
Ross Reynolds: If approached by an attorney, would you join a lawsuit like this? Do you think you have the goods?
Kristi Coulter: I would certainly talk to the attorney. I've never felt like anything that happened to me at Amazon rose to "call a lawyer" level, but if there was a class action and I could benefit from it, I'd have to take that phone call, right?
Ross Reynolds: You were in meetings with Jeff Bezos. What was that like?
Kristi Coulter: Scary. Jeff, in my experience one-on-one, was really cool. I actually really liked him. He's funny. He's very engaged. Almost in every meeting he'd say something that would make me go like, "Oh my God," something revelatory that I would remember. But it's frightening because he's so powerful. To be in the room with somebody who's the wealthiest man in the world. Or he was second or third at the time, was really, really terrifying to me, and I could never quite get past that. It was very hard to just see him as a person, even though he's actually quite personable.
Ross Reynolds: Notwithstanding Amazon's manifest success as a business, from the inside, did you ever think, they could be doing some of these personnel things better? Or does its very success say, "No, they're obviously doing it right"?
Kristi Coulter: In some ways, I thought the success said they were doing it right. Even at its best it would not be a place for everyone. You need to be super-comfortable with change and things moving fast and ambiguity, and it's really exhilarating. I got to work on things I never would've at more sane companies or companies with less money, but yeah, I mean, you would have to look around and think, these people are so good, so brilliant. My coworkers were so talented. What if they weren't also fried and exhausted and desperate? They could probably be even better and it just didn't seem sustainable.
Ross Reynolds: But how do you do both, I guess?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. I don't know that you do. I think that it's interesting seeing the struggles Amazon's having now. Part of me thinks, have they hit some wall? I got to a point where women locally especially would tell me, "Yeah, I just won't take their phone call. I won't interview at Amazon." The reputation was so bad it was pushing talent away. And that's anecdotal, of course. I'm sure lots of people would be happy to work there, but I remember thinking, that's not good when your rep is so bad that talented people just are writing you off because there's a lot of interesting things about working there.
Ross Reynolds: You write that success at Amazon wasn't necessarily having these core skills. It was figuring out how to work the Amazon system, how to get the programmers to do what you needed them to do.
Kristi Coulter: Yes. One reason I was able to move around a lot and actually have, really, a few different careers at Amazon was because people would openly say, "Well, I'm not so worried that you don't know how the publishing business works. You know how Amazon works and you could figure out the publishing business." And it's true, it was true. And when I talk to young people now, I always say, "Don't underestimate your transferable skills. Knowing how to meet people and ask questions and think critically, they're really valuable." But yeah, it would take someone else six months to figure out how Amazon works. It took me at least six months, and so we always wanted to hire from within. People would get frightened about hiring from outside because the ramp-up time would always be longer than we thought we could afford, because that's just how humans work.
Ross Reynolds: Amazon is so massive, and that really came through to me in a section in the book where you read news accounts, these famous accounts, of workers at an Amazon Fulfillment Center being taken out in ambulances because the temperatures were over 100 degrees. And part of your reaction was, "Oh yeah, that's the company I work for."
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. That was [reporter] Spencer Soper. He's here in Seattle now, but he wrote that in Pennsylvania. Yeah. I was like, "Oh, right. We have warehouses." Because I moved away from the retail business fairly early on. ... And it was shocking to realize how quickly something like that could just fall out of my view. But it did and then it did again.
Ross Reynolds: You went there because you were ambitious to do something big. By the time you left, did you accomplish what you set out to do?
Kristi Coulter: I worked on things I never would've dreamed of. I think in some ways I did accomplish what I set out to do, but I was the kind of person who got promoted like clockwork my entire life. I was just that kind of girl, I'm going to do the extra credit, I'm going to get promoted, and I never got the big promotion that was dangled in front of me for 12 years. I think I had seven or eight conversations with different bosses that were like, "You're a year away." And so by that one external metric of success, I left feeling like a failure. I was like, "Twelve years. These people, no one could manage to get me promoted." And it honestly still kind of bugs me.
Ross Reynolds: So you internalized that. You thought to yourself, "That must be my fault that I didn't get the promotion."
Kristi Coulter: I definitely thought so for a while, and then at some point I was like, "These people don't have their act together." Nobody could give me the same story. I had one VP tell me — I had a whole document with what I thought I needed to do to get promoted, and I wanted his feedback and he said, "Just change the world. Just change the world and you'll get promoted."
Ross Reynolds: Just change the world.
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. I was like, "Oh, thanks, dude. That's great." And it was like he wasn't even trying to have a serious conversation with me. And so I got to a point where I was like, "These people don't understand what they're doing, what they're talking about." I stopped blaming myself a bit then.
Ross Reynolds: I'm sure people ask you, "Should I go to work at Amazon?" What do you tell them?
Kristi Coulter: I usually tell them, "It depends." I don't tell people, "No. Just run screaming." But I think you want to be very specific and clear about what you want out of the experience. You want to probably go in with an exit strategy. Maybe if you're young in your career, you go in and you say, "I'm going to stay for three years and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, and then I'm going to go." And you have to remember that it's going to be rough and that no one is really going to care about you. Your coworkers and your boss, lots of wonderful people work there, but the system of Amazon really doesn't care if you are a well person or not, and it will absolutely spit you out.
Ross Reynolds: Since you started, Amazon has all these brand new buildings in downtown Seattle. So has the catering improved? Have those elements that were so starkly not there when you arrived, did they change over the years?
Kristi Coulter: A little bit. There are cafeterias now. I was in Columbia Tower with that weird food court, but there's no gym, the basic corporate amenities. We had bike cages and eventually we had some locker rooms. There weren't rooms for nursing mothers when I got there. There was a bathroom.
Ross Reynolds: Were there by the time you left?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah, yeah. ... But I was at a coffee shop somewhere and I heard a guy running a startup talking to an employee, and he was trying to give her a pep talk, and he was like, "This isn't Amazon. I'm not going to be able to give you the free meals and the free haircuts and the massages and ... but it's going to be fine." And I was thinking, wait, he's got the wrong idea about Amazon. It's not Google. So the main perk for employees was you could get $100 off the website per year if you went into the HR tool and found this code in January. Nobody would email you to remind you. They wouldn't send it to you. It was basically, if you remembered you could get that $100 off.
Ross Reynolds: Was that a conversation among employees there? "Boy, they're kind of cheap!"
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. We had a leadership principle of frugality, which is that you want to be frugal with money, which makes sense. But at some point, someone made a Wikipedia page called "frupidity," for the merger of "frugal" and "stupid." There were things like people being expected to fly to India multiple times a year in coach and go straight to the office when they got off the plane. I had a computer that was taking seven minutes to boot up and they didn't want to give me a new one because it wasn't quite at the end of its four-year life cycle. Things got really stupid.
Ross Reynolds: Your first book: Nothing Good Can Come From This: Essays About Quitting Drinking. Your second book, Exit Interview, The Life and Death of my Ambitious Career. Are those two things related, the drinking issues and working at Amazon?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Amazon did not make me an alcoholic. I was probably destined to be an alcoholic from a very early age, but I certainly was drinking more and more to just cope with the stress of the day. It was the only way I could forget every mistake I had made that day or every perceived mistake, and it really, really ramped up. And I actually ended up doing an A/B test because I quit drinking halfway through my Amazon career, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to stay, and stay sober, but I did. I stayed another five or six years. It's doable, but I really had to put up boundaries and develop a spine in a way that I had not had to as a drinker, when I could just go home and drink it away. So I had to change as a person, and not everybody liked Kristi with a backbone.
Ross Reynolds: That shows enormous strength, not only to be able to overcome this difficult workplace, but to overcome alcoholism, which is a disease.
Kristi Coulter: I didn't want to die. I was either going to die young or I was just going to not — My life was getting smaller and smaller. It was just Amazon and then drinking to get over Amazon, and I had enough, I don't know, vision to see that there had to be a better way.
Ross Reynolds: So have you gotten any comments from former colleagues at Amazon about Exit Interview?
Kristi Coulter: A flood. A flood of them. I have heard from so many people in Amazon offices around the world, women especially, saying, "Thank you for telling my story." But a lot of men too, which surprised me, because the book has such a gender inflection. Men saying either, except for the gender part, you were telling my story. ... Or, there's a lot in the book about the sexism as a lot of unconscious bias. It's not a place where men are just like, "Well, women are dumb." They don't know that they're sexist.
Ross Reynolds: Could you give an example of that? What is something that was, obviously, they're just clueless?
Kristi Coulter: The leadership at that level. So at my level, it was 20% women and 80% men. Amazon at entry level is about 50/50 split, and then women just vanish. And you get into management, women are gone. For most of the time I was there, there was no woman reporting directly to Jeff on the S Team.
Ross Reynolds: The S team is? For those who don't know.
Kristi Coulter: Oh, yes. The S team is basically Jeff's direct reports. It's the very top level of leadership. But whenever this would come up, men would just be like, "Well, I guess women, they just don't want these jobs really." Or, "Women have different priorities." ... I was like, really? It's 80% male as you go up the ranks? And a lot of it would come around to, well, women have children. But I was like, but I don't have... In fact, a lot of women I knew at Amazon did not have children because if you wanted to rise, it was much easier not to have children.
But I think that men were falling victim to this thing that men do sometimes and that I see white people fall victim to also, which is thinking it was their personal fault if an environment had structural sexism.
So they weren't able to step back and be like, "This is weird." Amazon had no company daycare, and that was something women talked about a lot, and I rarely heard men talk about it, and if men had talked about it, maybe something would've changed because they had the power. But it was just like, well, women don't want these jobs. I heard many times, "Oh, women are too smart to want these jobs." Like, oh yeah, we're just passing on the power and the money and the leverage. Sure. We're just too smart for that.
And so it's frustrating because when you can't name a problem, you can't talk about it at all. So a lot of men wrote to me saying, "Thank you for showing me what I just... absolutely, it was not seeing. I was just convinced that this is just the way that nature made it. Clearly, it's supposed to be mostly men for a reason," and that was great to see men be like, "Oh, right, this is not normal."
I've also had women tell me that physical copies of the book are being passed around Amazon from woman to woman, and they're writing notes and inscriptions to each other, and that sent chills down my spine. It's like a new little whisper network for women, like a yearbook or something.
Ross Reynolds: Have you got to do any readings here in Seattle and have those people show you those books with the annotations?
Kristi Coulter: I've seen a couple photos of one of those. But yeah, I have women come up to me at events in Seattle and within a minute they're crying. They just walk up and just start sobbing. And it's heartbreaking. I mean, it's wonderful because they're crying because they feel like the book showed them themselves, but I feel like there's a lot of people in pain out there in tech.
Ross Reynolds: Your book is called Exit Interview. Is this instead of a real exit interview? Did you get a real exit interview at Amazon? Did you get to say any of this?
Kristi Coulter: No, I did not. Amazon, it's a huge company. A lot of people just get this form to fill out, but some people do get in-person exit interviews. And as someone who'd been there for 12 years, I was in the 98th percentile for tenure and one of few women at my level. I thought, well, someone's going to want to talk to me. I was leaving on good terms. I got the form instead, and I was kind of stunned, but I thought, okay, I'll do this. And we had a tech glitch when I was submitting the form, which I had taken two hours to fill out, and it was lost to the ether, and I laughed because it was perfect. I was like, of course, now I'm going to leave, and still, my voice will not be heard. I could be glib and say, I wrote this book because I did not get an exit interview. But there was something to that. I was like, I have things to say about my experience here, and I am going to say them somehow.
Ross Reynolds: Just a personal question, because you worked at Amazon for 12 years, do you never have to work again?
Kristi Coulter: Oh my God, I wish. No.
Ross Reynolds: Not that good?
Kristi Coulter: Yeah. I was very well paid at Amazon. The pay was great, and I was there at a time when the stock was going insane. No. It bought me some ramp. Amazon paid for me to write this book, essentially. But no, I do need to work, sadly. But I like to work, also.
Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, by Kristi Coulter, is published by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It's available wherever books are sold (yes, including Amazon).
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Production assistance from Curt Milton.
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