Company: Apple
Date: 2016-12-13
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Mediocre—nice to visit, wouldn't want to stay
Pros: 1. Nice facilities.
2. Good food that's not terribly expensive. 
3. Decent pay for a technical writer.
4. People were fairly friendly, on the whole.
5. Great fringe benefits for full-timers (not for contractors), including a gym, on-site doctor, and other services.
6. You don't take your work home with you, as a contractor.
7. From what I can tell, Apple actually cares about its employees, and it tries to be a responsible corporation. That counts for something. A lot, really. My previous employer was happy to support bigoted political candidates just for the "pro-business" policies. I don't see Apple doing that. I do see it giving me a place to safely dispose of batteries, recycling waste on a huge scale, and building giant solar farms.
Cons: 1. This was some of the dullest work I've ever done. At the Austin location, most work seems to revolve around helping Apple-associated repair shops do paperwork. I wrote a lot of processes about things like explaining to an Apple keyboard jockey how to replace incorrect serial numbers and how to document returned parts—and so forth—to support these repair shops.

2. It can be impossible to get away from deficient personality types, and that can screw up organizational functioning. I had the misfortune to get saddled with the smuggest, most pedantic—and yet still unfriendly—person I have ever met. The kind of person who can't distinguish between "can" and "may," but who will take a paragraph to critique your use of "who," instead of "whom." The kind of guy who makes his neck tendons stand out from strain when he's trying to make an ordinary point about a slideshow in a meeting. There's no need for that kind of inanity in a clock-punching job. Anyway, he trained me and occupied the adjacent cube during my entire tenure. And because he dug himself in, there was no way to get away from him, even though it was clear to my supervisors and coworkers that this guy was an obstacle, regardless of how hard he worked. Everyone hated him, but there he is, immovable.

3. Apple is Byzantine. More arcane than you'd dare guess, and yet there's not an organizational chart to be found. Ask for one, and you get a weird oral history recounting the succession of lords and ladies in the various sub-departments. But not, say, a hierarchy of departments and brief descriptions of their functions. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to figure out how the organization works. 

4. Good luck getting access to the systems you need to do your job! I never got access to some of the systems I was actually writing processes for! Many times! Unbelievable.