Broccoli Rabe

The following is a guest post by Syl, a self-described “witness to the Internet.” She previously contributed her thoughts on Pride and Enmity, Humility and Grace.

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

I was recently laid off. In the way of many layoffs, it was unexpected, but I also wasn’t that surprised. As part of my job search preparation, I read “Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career,” by Kristi Coulter. The career at Amazon Coulter describes in this book is a pretty clear example of what I don’t want my next job to be like. I’m not looking to change the world - or wait a decade for a promotion based on my failure to do so. I have a modest amount of ambition at best. 

One of the themes of the book is how being a woman shaped Coulter’s experiences at Amazon. Amazon culture is male-centric, but also anti-”showing signs you’re a normal human being with weaknesses.” She describes a corporate world that’s all about how much you can endure, about showing how well you can flourish under grueling and ever-changing working conditions. 

I could relate to Coulter. Like her, I’ve been in some absurd work situations, and used alcohol to cope with them. I don’t typically think of myself as having faced sexism in my career. If anything, my overexposure to online feminism has probably made me more reluctant to attribute anything to sexism than I might have otherwise been. But maybe I have? It’s hard to say. What can I attribute to being a woman, and what’s simply up to the vagaries of fate? 

A few years ago, I found out a less experienced coworker was making $18K more than I was for the same role. My friends nodded sagely when I told them, “Ah, the gender wage gap.” But I kept trying to explain it away. Well, he lives in California, and I don’t. Except I’d had a former boss try to lure me out to our California office the year before. He’d told me there was no cost-of-living adjustment. Well, he left our company and they had to pay him more to hire him back. But later I found out that they’d originally only had one spot open. They wanted to hire me as I was more qualified, but ended up making him an offer as well because the hiring manager had a personal connection with him.  

Or there was the time I was invited to join the technical team for advanced troubleshooting in a support role I held earlier in my career. The other members were all more highly ranked and therefore I’d guess more highly paid than I was. Perhaps it goes without saying that they were also all men. I went into my first meeting thinking, “What a great opportunity to learn from my more experienced peers!” I walked out an hour later thinking, “What a great opportunity to mentor my peers and teach these men SQL!” 

The anecdote that stuck with me most came late in the book. A coworker accosts Coulter about some copy for an Amazon Meal Kit, Seared Salmon with Broccoli Rabe. “‘I noticed you spelled ‘rabe’ with a b,’ he says. ‘But I’m pretty sure ‘rape’ is the more common spelling.’” Her response is elegant:

“Yeah, that was a four-way judgment call. There’s also ‘raab’ and ‘rapini,’” I say, jotting them on my whiteboard. “AP doesn’t list a preference, but of the big recipe websites, most use ‘rabe,’ so that’s how I made my decision.” My use of “decision” instead of “recommendation” is not accidental. “What I generally do in that case is look at some of the top online recipe sites and see if there’s a consensus,” I say. “Of the six sites I checked, four used ‘rabe’ and two ‘raab.’” By now I’m accustomed to random men telling me we should change this or that word because they “don’t like it,” and I’m done explaining nicely that I’m not just pulling the store’s vocabulary out of my ass and don’t have time to argue about every little thing based on some guy’s feeling. 

[...] I wasn’t remotely surprised that all those sites picked the non-sex-crime spelling. I’m just trying to give him a graceful way not to die on this hill. 

But he persists in trying to persuade her that they need to test this within the organization, to find out which spelling people are more familiar with. It’s insane but all too believable. Okay, who calls it broccoli rape? I had to set my e-reader aside and Google it for a sanity check. 

Thanks, Google. 

There are three “Professional Help” chapters in the book, where Coulter shares the professional advice guiding her at that point in her career, revising it as her time at Amazon teaches her harder lessons. The thing that finally gets her to leave is when her long-delayed promotion gets pushed out another two years due to a reorg where a man who’s the same level is made her new manager. She puts in her notice and life moves on. Professional life can be so intense and consume so much of your waking efforts, but eventually each job is just… over.