Ex-AppleCare Employee Describes Life Inside Apple

ahknight writes "A former AppleCare employee writes about his time in Apple. From the article: 'I remember when I first started at Apple they had a picture in the training class of some guy in flip-flops, shorts, and a tropical shirt in a decorated cube with a goofy grin, the message being: it's casual. One fellow even went as far as pushing that to the reasonable limit by showing up to work every day for several months in a bathrobe and sandals (and shorts). I don't recall a word ever being said. I think he actually just gave up because no one said anything.'"

Comments

Re:Oh it's "this guy"

[Nijika]

Also, I guess you've never worked at a large-ish techsupport department or company?

Survey says... guess wrong! I've worked in three different large call centers. Two of them for major telcos that now don't exist.

If you are a highly skilled guy helping thousands of noob^h^h^h^h customers, management (ie. the guys you would unleash your "people skills" on) are going to do everything they can to keep you in place. That means no career moves. That means that after about a year or two, three it's time to move on. As the article states!

Look at this paragraph you've written. What's your argument here? It seems your argument is that those with the "real skill" won't make career moves. Those that can't "kiss ass" won't progress in a company.

What you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. Those that have technical know-how, but that also have no people skills, and no idea of what they want out of their life, and their career will yes indeed get stepped on. Also you've made my point for me, this guy, and you, can't seem to move past griping about "how bad" tech support is, and "how stuck" the skilled workers are. It's a steaming load. He's out of the job and he still has to post his "memoirs" on how down-trodden he was? He's hardly writing it in the past-tense. Talk about holding on... He's even talking about his current opportunity like it's some lucky break, like he didn't even earn it. He keeps going on about how superior he is, but when he get's acknowledgement for it, he calls it a roll of the dice!

Have you considered that showing drive and initiative, that showing some sort of ambition is in fact NOT kissing ass? There's a huge difference.

Be up in the face of your boss. Be an idea guy. If you're in a company you can participate outside of your department to get where you want to go. Step on toes, shit, why not, what are they going to do, fire you?

Sometimes it's about having a backbone, and being a productive whiner. Talking to the boss is not kissing ass.

This guy is right, he is lucky to have gotten out, because he was making a really half-arsed effort at his time at Apple.

what an ass

[procrastin8r]

While tend to sympathize with tech support folks, this guy is a whiny prick. he keeps moaning about how terrible his job is, but he stayed there for 4 years! Keeps bragging about his skillz, but can't seem to get off his ass and find another gig, I guess cause "the pay is pretty good," or somehow having his job made it too hard to mve up.

I hate any and all IT-types that condescend to people who don't know how to fix a computer. The line "I don't work well with liberal arts school graduate wussies. I tend to make them cry. It's not intentional, it's just that they're idiots" says it all. What a fucking prick. I went to art school, and I'm Apple-certified, but I'm pretty sure he'd call me an idiot too.

The sad truth is there's a huge amount of users out there that consider computers appliances and nothing more. PEBKAC is a reality, but they've not been trained to troubleshoot systems, because their jobs never required them to do so. That's were the IT-arrogance comes from.. dealing with comp problems is easy most of the time, but not if you never did it.. it' annoying to have to explain the basics to people, and yes there are plently of idiots... and that's what AppleCare is for. DUh.