Apple reviews

- No career growth: you have to fight for yourself, you will be lucky if you have a "nice" manager that "helps" - Work comes first attitude: "it doesn't matter what is happening in your life, get it done" - Back stabbing, two faced politics, lies - Lack of recognition for hard work - Surprisingly low pay compared to similar jobs in industry - Not valuing their employees: "it is a privilege to work at Apple, we can easily replace you" - Useless HR: incompetent and essentially managers spies; serious waste of space - Extremely under staffed - Unreasonable demands that have you working evenings (till morning) and weekend for things which end up not even being important - Serious lack of sense of "team": everybody is out for themselves - Pay rises are in % increases unless you get "promoted" (you aren't really given a new job, just a lot more responsibility and a bit more money, but sometimes no change to title or hierarchy placement) the amount can be insignificant. Max % increase was 10%, and that is really rare to get! ADVICE: negotiate a big base before joining so those % are worth more. - Company brainwashing practices are common (seminars, lectures, lessons). Its hard to believe how many people buy into it internally - Please note that the Europe Head office (in London) appeared to be a special case of intensity. The UK office and other European offices appeared to be not as bad (at least from my perspective). Though when weneeded things done by the local offices, they would feel our pain too. Till this day, the Local teams do not know how lucky they have it vs the Head office. I can only imagine how bad it is in the World HQ in Cupertino

The training is shaky at best, focusing on how to talk to people (which is obviously important) but breezing past a lot of the technical knowledge required to do the job well. During the first month or two on the phones, most advisors are like fish out of water. Nobody seemed to know how to answer most of the tech questions, whom they should contact for a given issue, or which internal procedures applied to which situations. It works itself out with time and experience, but the training should be more thorough before people are put on the phones with customers. There's a steady stream of calls from people who are ticked off and want troubleshooting help, but don't have AppleCare coverage. You have to tell those people, as nicely as possible, to either buy AppleCare for the device, pay $19 for a single issue, or try to find their own answers on the Apple website. Then, when they decline to pay for support and subsequently aren't happy with the outcome, you receive a 'dissatisfied' survey and get to discuss it with your manager. Dumb.