Company: Apple
Date: 2017-11-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

At-Home AppleCare - Not as good as it sounds
Pros: -Great pay and benefits relative to the work. 
-Managers will hear you out, they do not ignore complaints, but ultimately there is little they can do. 
-Discounts on products, including a significant one you get to use every 3 years.
Cons: I am going to start with how it feels to work here. First I should say, I LIKE Apple products and own one or two. That being said, the culture at Apple feels like a professional cult. There is a definite feeling of being watched... all of the time, and then being "corrected" whenever you think the wrong way. 
Examples:

-Chats being monitored - any negative statements are immediately addressed by a manager you were not even talking to. (e.g. saying in a chat "I am pissed that I am not allowed to request Christmas off" will be followed by a manager messaging you and saying "Let's remember to keep things positive!")
-Your call/phone status is always on a timer.. including going "idle" (which is what you have to do if you need to go to the bathroom or something so you don't miss a call) and if you are idle for more than 3 minutes.. well you be contacted by the manager monitoring you that day.
-Your issued iMac is setup to allow a manager to view your screen at any time without notification to you, so you never know when they are looking at your screen. 
-Recorded calls
-Constant feeling of secrets you cannot know, like being assigned new managers every 2-3 months, or having teams broken up and re-assigned for not obvious reason. 

The list gets longer and shorter depending on who your manager is.. some are really invasive and some are really laid back. 

Some other more general cons are:
-little to no flexibility in schedule, it is basically a lottery on what schedule you get and your requests or availability have no way of being addressed. I asked about moving my schedule to accommodate a single college class and I was told there was no way to do that because they "do not control the scheduling".
-no break in calls for entirety of shift and no ability to walk away from your at-home desk. 
-Working holidays is required, they actually have a vacation "blackout" period that covers the Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year's period where you are not even allowed to request vacation. 
-Only robotic ways of evaluating performance and being rewarded for good performance so if you are doing well, but the simplistic metric system is unable to analyze that.. then you are not doing well and no further opportunities will be presented to you. 
-Troubleshooting and resolving issues comes last in priorities, with priorities being to keep calls under 15 minutes and manipulate customers into "feeling" like they have been helped.. whether you actually solved a problem for them or not. 

I actually think in this position, it is somewhat of a necessary evil, because they are ensuring no time is wasted. With as many employees as they have doing this and for the pay they receive.. it is a requirement to ensure that people aren't just slacking off under no supervision in this at-home environment. However.. personally I find it the environment to feel dehumanizing and exhausting.