Company: Apple
Date: 2014-09-10
Overall rating: 5/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Company genuinely cares about you!
Pros: - Great benefits 
- great work environment
- great salary (especially for retail)
- lots of peer support
- lots of management support
- lots of learning experiences and resources
- opportunity for advancement
- opportunities for "career experiences" in corporate roles, for retail staff (underutilized, apparently. go for it!)
- you become really good friends with your peer group, or maybe even family!
- Amazing sense of belonging and community
- great stepping stone to new career, if that is your choice
Cons: - Too much "drinking the kool aid". WAY too much. I hope this is an apt metaphor: Imagine you have an 8oz cup in your hand. They pour a 64oz pitcher of Kool-Aid into your 8oz. cup. Then they pour a pitcher of sugar into the same cup. You get diabetes. The amount of company propaganda is absolutely astounding and excessive to point of being absolutely ridiculous, wherein you feel like a caricature of yourself wearing this blue shirt. This is coming from me, a lifelong Apple fan since 1987 (the year I started using computers).
- FAR too much bashing of anything that isn't Apple. Apple has now decided as a company, to compare itself to Samsung and Google, etc etc. It used to decide not to compare itself to anybody. This shows everywhere from development to retail attitudes.
- Willing isolation from and ignorance of the rest of the world of technology. Apple exists in a bubble, and those within the bubble are blissfully unaware that any other technology is relevant and useful. I heard one employee say that Microsoft Office is going the way of the dinosaurs. Nobody called him out on this. What dream world is he living in???? Isn't it better to learn Apple's technology in a way that helps it workably coexist with other technology? This is equally as important as learning the Apple ecosystem, which, yes, in itself is amazing.
- Training is too general, not specific enough to help sharpen one's technical skill set on a consistent basis.
- No ongoing training program to keep your technical skills sharp and up to date. Instead, they offer "Pathways", which is meant to improve your social skills. Great! But isn't that why they hired us to begin with? You have to search Apple's technical reporting system for relevant known issues, which is fine but if you don't (and a lot of techs don't)  you usually find out what those are when a customer has a problem and you don't know the answer. One person who happened to look at iDesk might know the answer, but if they're not available, you may end up giving the customer the wrong solution. The signal to noise ratio of important, specific information is a total mess.
- "I can't believe they re-arranged the lockers. I'm thinking about quitting now." Everyone joins in agreement. Really, guys? C'mon. Again, as I mentioned in my point about the Apple "bubble", the perception of reality can be largely distorted. Management has to work REALLY REALLY hard to bend over backwards for every little thing. So how much energy do they have left over to make sure their techs are up to date, or that sales staff knows their specs and has good ways of explaining tech to non-tech people? Apple is very big on managing expectations for customers (great, actually!) but could do a lot better to manage expectations for employees. Maybe this would improve management's time and ability to fix some more important issues.
- Far too many points of contact for customers. A customer may end up talking to between 4 and 8 different people who may end up telling them lots of conflicting things. Either communication needs to improve in the store or the number of contact points needs to decrease somehow.