Company: Apple
Date: 2020-03-17
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

High Highs and Low Lows
Pros: -Good pay BUT not consistent across all at the same job title/tenure
-Benefits available for full and part time employees
-Generous stock grants (RSUs)
-Good maternity/paternity leave policy
-I have been told the health insurance is great, although I did not personally use it so I can't say firsthand. 

Overall, Apple Retail has some high highs and low lows. I tried to document my experience as well as possible, and honestly ended up writing much more than I had originally intended. I do want to add the disclaimer that although there is a big block of text in the "CONS" section, I did enjoy working at Apple. I liked my job there, paid me well and I got valuable experience. Was it something I'd do as a career? No. Was it a good stepping stone in my professional development? Absolutely. I write this feedback not to slander Apple but to give a genuine account of my experience, prepare others who are considering joining Apple, and hopefully help Apple Retail improve for the sake of all Apple employees. 

At Apple, I had the privilege of meeting people with all kinds of different backgrounds, education levels, and experiences. Even now that I have moved on, several of my mentors at Apple continue to push me to improve. I can genuinely say that Apple was the most diverse company I have ever worked for, and yet it wasn’t a gimmick or to fill a quota. It felt like you could be your genuine self and I would say that I felt very welcome there. 

I experienced a tremendous amount of personal and professional growth during my time there. If you had asked me before I started, I would never have described myself as a leader and yet by the end of my time at Apple, I had led initiatives, coached/mentored my peers, and established myself as a leader, resource, and mentor. I learned how to talk about myself and the work I’m doing in a concise way (STAR / SBO). I learned how to collaborate with people with different work styles from my own, how to provide feedback in different ways based on how the person best receives it, and I learned how to challenge and be challenged without damaging my relationship with my colleagues. I learned a lot about my own worth as an employee and how to advocate for myself. I learned to seek to understand, to approach mistakes as opportunity for shared growth rather than an opportunity to place blame, and how to be empathetic even when it is easy not to be. 

Some of the best managers I’ve ever had were from Apple. These managers were not afraid to jump into the fray when we were at our busiest. They empowered my colleagues and I to make the call in a tough situation and backed us up on whatever we felt was best. They trusted us to do our jobs well and always sought to understand before giving feedback or calling out problems if they arose. They went to bat for us against managers who were quick to dismiss our talents.
Cons: For context, I was one of the top repair technicians and consistently rated within the top 3 in the store for repair quality and timeliness from the time I received my ACiT (Apple Certified iPhone Technician) certification. I passed my ACMT (Apple Certified Mac Technician) certification with a 97% (68 questions correct out of 70). In addition, I have prior experience building computers and have a solid grasp on how computers work / what hardware components do. 

No repercussions for calling off so it wasn’t uncommon for 5-6 people to call off a day.

At the Genius Bar, they consistently prioritized personality types over technical skill when considering candidates. Storewide, great candidates were consistently passed over in favor of more vocal candidates. It was also not uncommon for managers to play favorites, and some managers would actually do their best to undermine your development if they didn’t like you.

I believe that while skills can be taught, attitude is a key point of your personality and is not so easily changed. However, for this model of hiring the person, not the skill, there needs to be sufficient training to get the person up to a functional standpoint. I would say Apple has done a lackluster job when it comes to technician training the past few years. Genius (Mac technician) training consists of two weeks off the sales floor doing self-guided online trainings (few of which that actually apply to the service being provided), a certification assessment, and a week of repair shadowing. After that point, the new Genius can do their first repair ON A CUSTOMER'S MACHINE. Customers pay a lot of money for the products and a lot of money for repairs. It is absolutely unacceptable that the first computer a technician takes apart is a paying customer's machine. In addition, nearly all of the other Geniuses had no computer experience outside the Genius Bar. The troubleshooting process for most of my former peers is just pattern matching reported symptoms with support guides and regurgitating solutions. 

Despite being the youngest Genius on my team and the least tenured in the role, I regularly had to fix the mistakes of my peers. Some examples of repair mistakes include putting screws in the wrong location, not plugging in antenna / mic / camera / battery connectors before marking a repair as ready for customer pickup, not taking security precautions when dealing with batteries, leaving ESD sensitive components sitting out uncovered for hours at a time, bending a pin on a logic board, and more. I also had to reset customer expectations after one of my peers advised a customer that her new iMac wouldn’t run any faster than her 2013 iMac because they both had HDDs. The issue the customer was experiencing was no more related to the HDD than Java is related to Javascript (read: not related at all). In the end, I was able to fix the issue but the customer had clearly lost faith in the Genius Bar and honestly, I can’t blame her for that. 

The biggest issue though, in my opinion, was the inconsistency in management. The managers were either amazing or the worst, no in between. See my experience with the good ones in the “Pros” section. The bad managers, though, were awful. Micromanagement, lack of trust, and blatant favoritism were common. These managers clearly prioritized the customer in the store rather than the customer with a device awaiting repair. Mac repair consisted of 1-3 technicians (normally 1 on weekdays, 2 on fri/sat, 3 for special occasions), occurred only once per day for 2-3 hours maximum (normally 2), and yet at least one Mac technician was pulled to the floor early on a nearly daily basis causing a never-ending cycle of late repairs and angry customers. 

The store leader was the worst, in my opinion. They had no knowledge of Genius Bar processes yet frequently made (impossible) requests of the technicians. Example: a customer came in with a device with no accessible device identifier (missing SIM tray = no IMEI, would not turn on so no S/N, and the serial reader tool didn’t retrieve anything from the phone). The customer was advised that ideally the SIM tray would be needed or at minimum a proof of purchase to service the device as the internal ticketing system was tied to the device identifier (SN) and there was no way to create a repair / replacement for the device without it, even as a customer service exception. The customer started to escalate and get visibly upset, so the store leader got involved and after being informed of the situation, advised the technician to just replace the phone (a common exception when a customer is escalated). Except that there was no possible way to systematically replace the phone. Even if the technician took a phone off the shelf and gave it to the customer, there would still be a litany of issues preventing the customer from using the replacement. This is only one of countless examples.