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.'"

Article text (server slow)

[Anonymous Coward]

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-shit 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 [slash7.com] 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.

Bitchman 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 Mac OS 9 (no one was

Since when does whiny former help-desk employee...

[TheNoxx]

Become /. front page material?

Just wondering.

Re:little Apple

[Milton Waddams]

Yeah, disappointing article. I thought it would would have been written by a developer or something. Anyway, I worked for a few months in customer tech support last year. The actual work of giving tech support wasn't that bad. Customers not knowing much about computers didn't really bother me. The work wasn't very interesting and there's no way I'd stick at it. That's because very little technical knowledge is needed. Like you said, at least half of the job comprises of being able to communicate well over the phone. Actually, tech support probably doesn't suit techies at all. The thing that I didn't like about the job was the employers. Every second counted. You had to account for the time you went to the toilet etc. Also, the managers were mostly annoying and unhelpful. The morale wasn't great. Everyone hated their job and moaned about it a lot. Also, the pay was terrible. So the reasons I didn't like the job had little to do with the actual work. I've had worse jobs. I worked in McDonalds! Now that was a shit job.

A simple backup solution

[rvw]

I have the same problem, and have a simple mechanism for backing up my data. On my Mac, I have one extra physical harddisk for backup. On that disk I create an encrypted virtual drive (DMG), my backup image. I have Deja Vu installed and it runs daily/weekly to make a backup. About every week I copy the encrypted disk image to an external harddisk. This means I only have to copy one file, which is a lot quicker when using USB 2.0 (in my experience) then copying thousands of files (like those in the library). I suppose on Windows you can do the same.

I use two 2.5" harddisks, because they don't need a power supply (usb 2.0), and they are small and better prepared for moving around. One is always in a different place (at work), and when I make a new backup, I swap them. If someone would steal it, they would have to know the password to open the dmg. The only thing is that this way you don't have a backup from a longer while ago.

This mechanism may seem difficult to setup (for the average user), but when it is setup, it works really easy. The only thing you have to do is copy the dmg-file to the external harddisk.

Practical Backup Solution

[localman]

Though it requires a small investment, it's definitely possible and worthwhile to set up a practical backup solution. I had all my data on a Powerbook with a 120GB HD, but I purchased a 250 GB external hard drive [lacie.com] and left it on my desk at home. Every few weeks I'd plug it in and click on "backup" (the drive came with backup software called silverkeeper). The initial backup took a little over 30 minutes, and incremental backups took 5 or 10.

Last month my laptop was stolen, and though I was pretty upset, at least I didn't lose a meaningful amount of data. I just picked up a new MacBook Pro, plugged in the hard drive, and restored in a little over 30 minutes.

So there is a practical backup solution out there. That's mine. You're right that DVD's are certainly not it. But I'm pretty happy with mine. Unless two geographically seperated disks die in the same timeframe, I'm good.

Cheers.

Re:Minor rant

[RogerWilco]

USB harddrive

Re:little Apple

[Silicon Jedi]

That was a bad rep for a bad Company

Jeez, I do that exact job for [DELETED] and I would basically have actually tried top duplicate the issue witth you, made you drop all your firewalls(and pants) so I could ping you and the modem, then had you start the connection. I would then had told you to get a new modem. (And we would provided it for no charge, provided you don't mind returning it if you cancel.)