Company: Apple
Date: 2019-06-13
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Hostile media analytics organization
Pros: Exposure to Apple's media products that are gaining traction quickly
Cons: If you see an opening in the AMP (Apple media products) or iTunes analytics or data science team, and you are a non-white analytics professional who actually wants to grow (not become a reporting machine), avoid it at all cost.

The AMP analytics org is highly political and hostile towards other departments besides business and marketing who fund them. It’s now managed by a bunch of white males who took power but now don’t know how to bring in analytics talents with real industry experience or build a team that can serve all the reporting needs across the company. These guys have been at Apple for most of their careers, so they only know how to churn out reports with whatever data is available but don’t really know how to contextualize analytics insights. They’ve either hired query monkeys or diversity hires who are less than competent, while talents with real leadership and industry experience have departed. 

The culture of the teams within the org is finding scapegoats when they make mistakes, favoring and promoting white males, and managers taking all the credit for their team members’ hard work. There’s little opportunity to really grow in terms of your skill set and leadership, because everybody in the org now just kind of fake it til’ they make it.

Data engineering is extremely slow in providing support, and the backlog keeps getting pushed around from one team to another, so no real roadmap plus frustrated stakeholders.