On the outside looking in, Apple seems like a terrific place to work — and for many employees it certainly is. We have spoken with a number of former and current Apple employees over the years who fondly recall their time with the Cupertino, California-based technology giant. But as is the case with any company, everyone’s experience is unique and not all employees mesh. Jordan Price was a mobile designer at Apple and he thought it was going to be his dream job. According to a recent post on the blogging platform Medium, however, his time at Apple was awful and he had to quit.
Working at Apple had long been a dream of Price’s… but reality almost never stacks up by comparison.
“Then I started. I immediately was uneasy about the rigid hours and long commute, but at least I could be one of those notorious tech people whizzing to and from San Francisco on a private bus with wifi (I’m especially intrigued by the bus thing because I grew up in San Francisco and have seen the cultural and economic shift that’s resulted from this tech boom and the last,” Price wrote. “Now ironically I was one of the techies who some people think is ruining the city.) I hardly (hardly meaning never) saw my daughter during the week because the hours were so inflexible. I had also taken a substantial pay cut, but I figured I was making a long-term career investment by working for such a prestigious company.”
He continued, “On boarding was super bumpy, and they had so many passwords, accounts, and logins that it took nearly a month just for me to get on the server. There were meetings all the time which were disruptive to everyone’s productivity, but they seemed to be a necessary evil in a company that’s so large with such high-quality products. It was all a bit bothersome, but nothing that would be a big problem in the long-term I thought.”
Worse than all that was the fact that according to Price, his boss was very unprofessional, going as far as to regularly insult anyone beneath him.
“My immediate boss, who had a habit of making personal insults shrouded as jokes to anyone below him, started making direct and indirect insults to me. He started reminding me that my contract wouldn’t be renewed if I did or didn’t do certain things,” the former Apple designer wrote. “He would hover over my back (literally) like a boss out of Dilbert and press me to finish some mundane design task that he felt urgently needed to be examined. He was democratic about his patronizing and rude comments, but it didn’t make me feel any better when he directed them towards my team members.”
His next line really stands out: “I felt more like I was a teenager working at a crappy retail job than a professional working at one of the greatest tech companies in the world.”
Price says that he tried to keep his career in mind and tough it out, but in the end he had no choice but to save his sanity and quit.
The full post can be found by following the link in our source section below.
