This week, I read another corporate memoir. Spoiler: I didn’t learn anything. You probably won’t either! Also, a fun fact: you all open my book reviews at a much higher rate than my beauty reviews. Are you actually a literary crowd? Should I include more books? I’ll ponder. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another deck to work on.1 — Nic
“Exit Interview” Book Review
This memior covers the author’s decade-plus at Amazon corporate, with all the reorgs, lay-offs, and “Do you have five minutes to chat?” emails that go along with it. Kristi Coulter chronicles her experience as a middle manager in the late '00s through early '10s while working for one of the world's richest men at one of the most scrutinized companies on earth.
Length: 384 pages
✅ Why It Works: Well, as a corporate drone myself, it confirmed that every workplace is the same. So, that was a plus.
❌ Why It Doesn’t: I listened to the audiobook, and it felt like having my own work day narrated back at me while I worked. How boring. Maybe it’s better in print?
Format aside, this felt rather … whiny. I believe this was supposed to be an exposé about the horrors of working for Amazon (à la “Careless People”), but it didn’t have the bite or the impact that “Careless People” did. It was hard to have sympathy when the author was talking about last-minute project changes and people asking her to write copy in a hurry because … that’s just work? Nothing jumped out at me as a true “gotcha” moment. Plus, she was well-compensated for her time, so it’s not like we were talking about an unpaid intern here.
Where the book gets interesting — and frustrating — is when Coulter touches on sexism, burnout, and the quiet soul-sucking erosion of your spirit part of American corporate culture. These are real, important observations. But she never connects the dots into a larger argument. I would have liked to see more of the why behind the story — how did we get this way? What should we do to change it?
Read It? Eh. If you’ve worked a corporate job, you’ve lived this. If you haven’t, you’ll be shocked at the made-up bullshit that stresses out my fellow hamsters and me on the Fortune 500 wheel.
Rating: ✨✨.5/5
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🍿 “Project Hail Mary” is the biggest box office hit since “Oppenheimer.” Like Slurpees and popcorn, space sagas and Ryan Gosling will always be a winning combo.
🍫 That Hershey’s candy might not be real chocolate. Due to high prices and a climate change, the classic cocoa is being replaced with sugar, oil, and milk, among other ingredients. Well, ick.
😶🌫️ Watch out, allergy sufferers. A Creston, Iowa, fire department responded to a reported fire. It was actually a giant pollen cloud.
My sinuses are horrified.
🧙 Yer a reboot, Harry. The new “Harry Potter” trailer just dropped for HBO’s streaming series, and it appears they took the old costumes out of storage and called it a day.
Yes, J.K. Rowling is evil, but I’ll always have some millennial nostalgia for the first movie series.
📲 Downloading: Gem, an app that lets you search all secondhand marketplaces at once for vintage finds.
🤧 Sniffling: Due to the aforementioned pollen cloud, I have broken out the Astepro for the season.
🛍️ Shopping: Uniqlo’s Denim Boxy Shirt. It looks like a good layering piece when my regular denim jacket is too heavy.
See you next Sunday, cult members.
1 If you don’t speak corporatese (I’m jealous) a “deck” is simply a PowerPoint slide presentation.