Company: Apple
Date: 2017-04-28
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Doing what they know best these days *gasp*
Pros: If you're looking for a gig with low pressure sales quotas, no aggressive commission structures, and a family-like environment - Apple is the place is for you. While there, they will make you feel very welcome and included. Your ideas will be listened to, and they'll make you feel valued. Plus the benefits are some of the best in the field.
Cons: Apple is slowly and visibly gravitating from a innovative professional hardware and software company to a fashion company. Speaking from a retail perspective, many employees in the past were experienced working professionals who had deep knowledge in their respective fields be it photography, audio engineering, or filmmaking. What an employee lacked in knowledge or for upcoming software changes, Apple management and department leads made sure you were given ample development time to grow and learn. The structure then was unofficially to inspire your customers, and the sales will follow.

As time progressed, Apple leadership put more emphasis on "people leaders" who had poor knowledge of the product. As such, many of these new "people leaders" brought in from companies like Starbucks, Best Buy, Target, etc. didn't and still don’t share those same values as their passionate employees. Over time, the professionals working for the company became burned out and moved on, either by their own accord or a manager's. To fill the places of these working professionals were employees with no professional background, given little practical training on the software they were to learn resulting in having employees with poor knowledge on the product or subject if questions arose. The Apple professionals remaining in the company became complacent and/or bitter that they were being paid similar amounts as those newer employees with lesser experience, yet they were expected to assist with their deeper knowledge when a customer required it. This effect cause these professionals to exploit Apple's attendance policies resulting in less staff during a planned out day. A great example is seeing the Genius Bar become so famously behind. A lot of that is due to staff calling out for their shifts leaving their peers and lower ranking employees to pick up the pieces and learn-on-the-fly. When these problematic staff members were set to be confronted, they'd go out on leave-of-absence through stress or some sort of injury and return once the dust settles on their attendance record. This is a very deep problem Apple has yet to permanently resolve today.  

What has since become noticed and evident is how most of Apple’s newest leaders are not inspirational tech professionals. They don’t develop you to want to use the platform or software. They weren’t promoted through the ranks, but were rather hired outside the company and brought in. They’re most interested in taking you through leadership development for a few months at your same rate then throwing you back into your old responsibilities with little to show for what you’d learned. The bulk of their leaders don’t even know how to use a word processor, build a spreadsheet, or even edit a photo. They’re there to coach on sales, inspire performance, and defuse customer escalations (overriding whatever fair resolution you had positioned to your customer). It’s not the Apple environment it once was, and has slowly gravitated into a sales organization first. Sell first, then invite them back to a workshop to be inspired later.