Company: Apple
Date: 2021-05-29
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Good but not a long term career unless you’re okay with very slow career growth
Pros: For some background: I started in the college program working part-time as an Mac+ Advisor for 2.5 years. After graduating, I was offered a full-time position and immediately promoted to iOS Senior Advisor role. I worked as an iOS Senior Advisor for 2 years. I had the opportunity to temporarily be a Mac+ mentor for newly trained advisors making their first every calls with customers and work in a retail store repairing iOS devices. Right before I was about to leave the company, I was offered to laterally move to Mac+ Senior Advisor. I consistently ranked top 5%-10% in average metrics amongst all company-wide Advisors.

The pay was good for what the job entailed when comparing to other companies.

You get a wide variety of customers, making it pretty interesting day-to-day.

I definitely learned how to be patient with people and how to keep your cool even if someone is berating you.

Apple definitely sets you up for success when it comes to providing you the resources to perform your job properly. There’d be some situations where there wasn’t actually any documented process for certain situations, but I can’t blame the company for that since those situations were fairly rare.
Cons: During my time with the company, it was clear that as internal advisors were leaving, the company was filling those positions with contractors. These contractors usually never really actually fixed issues properly and that would cause customers to repeatedly call back for same issues. What this meant to me is that Senior Advisors were primarily there to clean up contractors’ mistakes and “win” the customer back.

Frequent management and team changes happened every year, sometimes even multiple times a year for some. This made it difficult to make any lasting relationships with co-workers as well as when it was already difficult to do so in a remote setting. I had 5 different managers with 4 completely different teams within a 4.5 year span. 

Most managers were not very technical and when they review your performance, they mostly look at the metrics and how much you contributed to the company as a whole (kind of hard when the manager has only worked with you for a year or less).

Once you get to Senior Advisor role, it’s fairly clear that if you want to promote to anything else, you have to drink the Apple Juice and be a “puppet” for management for a few years. Even then, chances are very minimal as the competition is extremely high regardless of how consistently high your annual review/metrics are.

In the end, this is a customer service job, not a technical job. I’m definitely a more technical person and regardless of how technical you are and how well you are at resolving issues, management won’t recognize it since you ultimately are just number for them amongst a huge pool of customer service employees. Yes, Apple provides possible paths to a more technical position within AppleCare, but even then, it is very difficult to get there with opportunities being limited. The ones that got there in the first place after starting as an advisor were with the company for more than 6-8 years back when the company wasn’t as large as it is today. Once I realized this, I didn’t want to spend most of my young career years trying to get noticed at a lower level position of a major tech company.