I don’t even think I realized Exit Interview was about Amazon until I checked it out of the library, it was a “coming soon” title and the author seemed familiar so I put it on hold. The cover should have been a little clue but I think I thought it was just about office work. Now I realize I remember when her first book came out but I didn’t read it. I read this one! It was much stranger than I expected.

The complete obliviousness she claims to have had about so many things ranging from sexual assault, the conditions of the warehouses (that they even had warehouses), that Amazon had delivery vans, the inequalities in leadership was unbelievable. It’s a real thread through the whole book-she has no idea of what is going on in the company despite rising through the ranks to quite a high position, extensive travel, running large programs and working in many different arms of the company. Willful ignorance perhaps? I don’t know but I didn’t find it believable at all.

There are also some structural issues. Some of the chapters flowed but others were just lists. It was hard to get a firm grasp on the timeline of anything because she skipped around a lot. Some things she really harped on (for example paying both a mortgage in Michigan and rent in Seattle) got resolved in a really off handed manner which didn’t match the level she built them up to as an issue.

I didn’t get a real sense of her personality or anyone else’s from coworkers to her husband. I know her husband likes to cook on their fancy stove and she drank too much and wasn’t very assertive (yet still did very well at Amazon??) but that’s really it.

I’m puzzled by reviews and the blurb that said it was funny. Where? When? It was a bleak tale of a woman working in an awful place for many years seemingly oblivious to how much even more awful it was that she realized?

I have a lot of negative feelings about Amazon but have sort of come to accept it as a necessary evil in my life as so many things (even basics like my contact lens solution, toothpaste, dog food, health care items for my father etc) become difficult or impossible to buy in person locally despite living in a medium city and having access to a large metro area with plenty of shopping so I can’t totally fault her for taking and keeping the job but her strange insistence she knew nothing about the company was hard to buy. We all know Amazon.