Company: Apple
Date: 2013-09-08
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

A great company to work for with a few glaring flaws.
Pros: Great co-workers, challenging environment that will build personal & job skills like at no other company.  The wealth of personal and job growth someone can have working at Apple is unrivaled at any other company.  Apple employees, due to excellent training and a stringent selection process are highly skilled and personally well rounded, if not from the moment of hire, they will become that way within the first year of working in the Apple environment.  Apple provides a sort of education that can't be learned anywhere else.  

Employees are paid well for retail.  There are frequent opportunities for lateral movement in the store, and opportunities to "intern" or work temporarily at corporate.
Cons: In a crowded retail environment where employees often get sick from their customers / the public, Apple has an attendance policy that severely punishes employees for taking sick days.  Because of this, most employees come to work sick [and sometimes injured], especially during flu season and the holidays, to avoid being penalized.  This, in turn, gets more people sick.  During the holidays, 30-50% of the employees in the store will be at some degree of ill, many repeatedly re-catching illness from other co-workers.  

Upwards mobility is limited.  Apple often hires outside manager candidates with little or no experience working in the store and places them in a position to manage people far more experience than them.  Apple also has policies in place to prevent managers from building a human connection with the people they manage, such as preventing the few internally hired managers from working with previous co-workers, and preventing managers from having any social interaction with non-management employees outside the store.  As a result, managers form their own "social click" like the the "cool kids in high school" that is entirely detached from the rest of the store.