Photo: valuewalk.com
Apple dropped to only the 16th best tech company to work for, and 35th overall, in Glassdoor’s annual ranking of the 50 Best Palaces to Work – down from 3rd in tech and 10th overall last year.
Based on over half a million reviews written by employees, Apple took 35th place, with fifteen tech companies ahead of it in the list, with Twitter taking the top tech slot, and LinkedIn and Facebook completing the top three.
Fortune did some sampling of Apple employee reviews to give a sense of why the company didn’t rank more highly, with retail staff particularly critical.
- Creative (Apple Store): It’s busy. All. The. Time.
- Packaging Engineer: High stress, long hours, too much security.
- Genius: Difficult to move up. Interactions with customers can be trying. Understaffed and overworked. Hours can feel long and are inconvenient to a proper work life balance.
- Mac Specialist (Apple Store): Hard to internally grow into management. Too touchy-feely at times. Managers pulled in too many directions.
- Front End Engineer: Long hours during project launches and work/life balance takes a backseat at some points.
- Apple Solutions Consultant: You have no authority to make any real decisions but you are still required to make them.
- Senior Network Engineer: People always watching you. There are people that want to put you down. No respect for contractors. Tough work.
- Manager: Expect to deal with a lot of ambiguity and shift gears in the dark. Some in-between senior management are a disappointment.
Apple was, however, rated for offering “great pay at a highly admired company,” offering a “diverse set of challenges and products to work on” and having “many opportunities for career growth, technically and managerially.”
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I don’t bother going to Apple Stores anymore. They are usually so overcrowded and busy with the associates running all over to help various people it just feels like a mess and I get sick of having to continuously contort my body to navigate through a sea of people. I’d much rather just shop online or go to an authorized reseller like Best Buy.
So I sympathize with the retail workers complaining about their jobs. It’s unpleasant for me to even be in the store as a customer for 10 minutes so I can imagine it not being so great to be working in there for hours.
The Apple store at any mall seems to be the only place that has any traffic these days. Most stores in a mall are ghost towns.
Very true – I went to one last month just because I wanted my iPad Air right away, but generally I order from the online store
“Senior Network Engineer: People always watching you. There are people that want to put you down. No respect for contractors. Tough work”
He’s a contractor. I know, thats basically me. Companies generally never fully trust us. It’s the nature of the position because you have no vested interest in the company you’re currently working for, you could be reassigned and working for a competitor in days/months and he’s complaining? Don’t think he should be even be included in the survey. Technically Apple is his contract companies customer, not his employer.
Good point
Wow, sounds a bit brutal, but really no different than any tech company I’ve worked for (I am a systems engineer). You have figure though, that out of the many thousands of tech companies just in the U.S., being ranked 16 is pretty darn good.
People always act so surprised when they hear this stuff. People are under the crazy impression that working Apple retail is like Disney Land or Willy Wonka. The truth is, it’s like every other retail store out there. There’s no fairy dust and unicorn tears at work. Just blood and sweat, crappy hours, crappy pay, and a ton of obnoxious customers.
Whiners.