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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.'"
Did it run linux?
AppleCared: My Life Inside Apple and AppleCare
By Adam Knight Posted on May 12, 2006 - 1:03am
You can only work in a technical service position for a limited amount of time before it loses its luster and shine, and you start to follow. Once you've performed a job for several years, you get into the groove and know how it's done. The knowledge is all there, somewhere, and it becomes routine to just look it up and spit it out on demand. You keep doing this, time and again, and eventually become a fixture: unchanging, unmoving, static.
The problems compound when this job involves the general public. Any technical job that involves helping masses of uncensored human beings understand technology will eventually wear the average man down, causing him to go bat-*** crazy and scream at the top of his lungs while trying to take out a swath of them with a surprise barrage of old SCSI cards. The largest catalyst for such violent behavior and general mental breakdown is best described by stating, simply, that most people exist at a significant intellectual delta from that burnt-out husk of a technology worker.
This doesn't have to pose a problem in an ideal world. In an ideal world, common people would be willing to accept advice from anyone capable of delivering it. In this real world, however, half of those that acknowledge that they need such assistance will turn violently against anyone they seek help from with such winning phrases as: "What do you think I am, stupid?" In most of the remaining cases, the user is a support vampire and that simply ruins those willing to try and help as badly as being berated for offering the answer. This behavior is evident in forums, mailing lists, in person, and most especially on the phone with technical support.
As a technical support agent, you develop mental calluses that help you move on and through the chaff and treasure the customers that are amiable, acknowledge that they need help, and are happy with the answer they're given. Genuinely happy. A good number of calls are actually like that and make the job bearable. A similar number are very, very far from it.
However, the core reason of why I recently quit my job in AppleCare is that in commodity technical jobs there's only so far you can go before you arrive at the end of the career path for the masses of technical agents and hit the lid where only five or ten pass upwards. Ever. When you get there, you have two choices for moving ahead: wait for the person in the cushy job you want to leave or die to make room and pray that it's you among the masses that applied that gets it, or move ahead elsewhere. After waiting for someone to bite it in a freak keyboarding accident for four years, it was time to go with Plan B.
So one day, when I had a life outside of the company set up and ready, I walked up to my manager and said: iQuit.
***man Begins
I worked in Austin's AppleCare center for four and a half years as a desperation move after a programming gig decided they'd rather give it a go without me several months earlier and my severance and unemployment checks stopped paying the bills. I've used a Mac since I had control over my mousing finger, so performing remedial technical support for Macs was an obvious choice for some quick money. Mac OS X 10.1 had just come out a few months previous, which was the only free upgrade Apple has ever released for Mac OS X as it was mostly an apology to those that bought Mac OS X 10.0. The PowerBook Titanium was the king of the road, until you opened it the 333rd time and the hinge decided it was time to move on in life. There were other Apple products, but I didn't care because those were the two I was told I supported at the time.
The job was remarkably easy, but it had been a long time since I'd done phone support, so I had a lot to learn on the procedural side. They have a shortish training course that they put all new-hires through that taught them how to use iMovie, what an iPod was (the 5GB bricks, at the time), and how to troubleshoot
Survey says... guess wrong! I've worked in three different large call centers. Two of them for major telcos that now don't exist.
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.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
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.