Company: Apple
Date: 2008-06-01
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Watch your back!
Pros: Apple has some of the best designed and accessible products in the world. Every product is lovingly designed, and it shows in the attention to detail. As a Genius, someone who was responsible for troubleshooting and taking apart these products, even on the inside many design details came to light to show the care that was put into each machine. Depending on where you worked, each store brought together such a wide variety of employees, from kids just out of high school working a summer job to the guy who has been using Macs for ten years and knows it inside and out... the benefits are good and you meet so many amazing people.
Cons: Its too bad the retail management is absolutely terrible. When I was in training to become a Mac Genius, our trainer referred to them as turning Apple into "Gapple" because so much management had such little knowledge about computers and came from retail environments. Our store manager was a college dropout (albeit from Stanford) who originally came from Starbucks and had never been a manager before. Two of our assistant managers also came from Starbucks, and one came from Wal-Mart. Our Senior Assistant manager encouraged a young employee that college was "pointless" and she should drop out to become a creative. The retail job used to be very different with much better benefits, but sadly has now turned into just another mall jobs, just prettier on the outside than others. Benefits were slowly stripped, from turning a quarterly bonus into a ~$.75 raise for everyone, to the removal of the "free iPod" for every employee plan, to just making the job seem less like working for a cool company that cared about you and well, just another job.