
Confessions of an Apple Store Employee - ghurlman
http://www.popularmechanics.com/print-this/confessions-of-an-apple-store-employee?page=all
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brudgers
> _"We usually have to tell them that if they unlock their iPhone, it won't
> work. That it's going to be like a $700 paperweight, and that the antenna
> will fry itself on T-Mobile. Of course, that's not true, but that's what we
> tell them."_

I didn't know Apple stores have an Evil Genius bar.

~~~
eli
Reminds of when Cablevision was first rolling out broadband internet and the
tech who came to set it up insisted that attempting to connect the modem to
more than one computers would "knock out cable TV for everyone on your block."

~~~
jrockway
To which my reply would be: "and why would I care?"

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VladRussian
>eventually get to the Genius Bar

that answers the question that puzzled me a bit about that name. In itself it
isn't a bad marketing targeted for customers, yet it happens to be also
successful marketing targeted at the employees. That's really genius, pun
intended, as usually help/support desk is very unpopular, churning job leading
nowhere and here they turned the tables and made other jobs leading to it
instead.

~~~
jrockway
I bet the average first-year help desk employee at an investment bank is
making a lot more money than the senior "Geniuses" at Apple Stores. Retail is
retail.

~~~
VladRussian
first-year help desk employee at an investment bank is at the bottom of the
bank's barrel, nobody at the bank would want their job.

~~~
ryall
I think that was his point, "genius".

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daimyoyo
The thing I found most interesting about this article was actually an
omission. The hiring process at Apple retail is the most insane thing I've
ever experienced. First fill out the application in store. Then follow up with
the manager of the store for weeks on end. Then have a quick interview in
store. Then go to a group interview with 50 other people. Then go to a panel
interview with 3 others. This process took 6 months start to finish and I
didn't even get the job. The reason why people want to be a "genius" in store
is they already went thru hell and back just to get in the store.

~~~
tomkarlo
Psychologists say the harder it is to gain entry to a group (club, frat,
union, guild, company) the more irrationally positive folks feel about it once
they're a member. Human nature -- if they went through all that trouble to get
in, it must be worth it.

~~~
jodrellblank
I like Eliezer's take on that regarding science and cults - scientific
knowledge is given away so freely it must be worthless, at least with cultish
bullshit you have to work hard before they tell you about each bit, so it
feels really substantial and valuable.

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/p0/to_spread_science_keep_it_secret/>

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mirkules
The Public Computers section is really interesting. Homeless people that come
in to do webcasts? Kinda cool.

People changing keyboard settings to Russian? Pfft, everyone knows the real
evil genius is in setting it to Arabic -- not only is it illegible, but the
screens are flipped

~~~
ajarmoniuk
Or Hebrew.

~~~
billswift
If you have ever studied both of them, even briefly, you know Arabic is much
less legible than Hebrew. It takes a lot of work even to figure out what the
letters are in Arabic (they all look like parts of a doctor's signature).

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ashleymoran
The thing I found by far the most interesting is about the sales process /
incentives.

On the one hand, Apple is not encouraging dysfunctional competition within the
team:

> We aren't paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you're not
> selling enough.

And yet on the other, they are:

> We have a posted list of our metrics, and you can see everybody else's. It
> shows you how much money each person is pulling in for the company. If you
> aren't doing very well, you start getting manager meetings, and they sit you
> down and try to figure out why you aren't selling more.

The best explanation of this I've seen is in the work of W. Edwards Deming.
His Red Bead experiment demonstrates that in any system, there will be
variation that is due to the system itself, and not due to the individual
efforts of the staff themselves. Because of this, league tables and metrics
randomly and arbitrarily punish people for performance variation that is out
of their control.

<http://www.redbead.com/what/>

Deming even listed "evaluation by performance" as one of the seven deadly
diseases afflicting the western economy.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_Diseases)

On that basis, I find it strangely contradictory that a company with such
ongoing quality efforts as Apple has produced a sales process absent of the
disease of sales commission, yet still suffering the disease of Evaluation by
Performance.

It's possible, however, that Apple is being more sophisticated than the post
author realises. If they have statistical control charts, for example, there
may well be no contradiction here at all (they would only be reviewing
exceptional outliers). But with Apple's tight-lipped nature, I don't know if
the evidence to decide that is out there yet.

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dsuriano
I was always under the understanding that working retail is a pretty
unglamorous job.

~~~
beeeph
You mean you've actually managed to escape working in retail at some point in
your life? How did you pull that off?

~~~
lsc
eh, it's not that hard. For some of us, it's actually easier. I've never had a
difficult time finding technical positions, but retail jobs? As a young
person, I tried and was rejected. Front-line tech support is appropriate in
the same career stage as a retail job. The minimum skills required are not
that different[1], however, as far as I can tell, if you are willing to learn,
tech support offers a better upward path than retail, so it does make long-
term sense to choose level 1 tech support over retail.

[1] The minimum level for both jobs, as far as I can tell, consists primarily
of explaining simple things and dealing with angry people. If you want to
climb the ladder in tech support, obviously, you need to go somewhat beyond
that, but you won't get fired if you can do those two things.

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kgo
You need a verifiable SSN to get an iPhone?!?

Attn drug dealers, you can get BlackBerries and Droids from Boost or Cricket
without giving any personal information.

~~~
scott_s
Not for the iPhone itself, but for the account with AT&T or Verizon.

~~~
jgh
They don't really need the SSN. If they press for it, tell them you're on a
visa and you haven't been assigned one. Verizon entered 123-45-678 for mine
and it let them create the account :P

~~~
edkennedy
Be prepared to put up a $400 security deposit if you have no credit/ssn

~~~
jgh
I got that with AT&T, not Verizon though.

~~~
ipince
That is... odd. I'm pretty sure that was an exception, not the rule. You must
have caught the customer service rep on a good day :)

------
smikolay
this all is largely positive - not really a confession, more bragging...

be curious how other customers have fared in the store, for me it has rarely
been great [http://www.mikolayczyk.com/2010/02/quotes-from-apple-
store.h...](http://www.mikolayczyk.com/2010/02/quotes-from-apple-store.html)

certainly rings true that they get power hungry and very arrogant as a result

~~~
mbateman
The Apple store in Philly just opened recently and they've been wonderful so
far. Ex.: A few weeks ago I spilled water on my iPhone, rendering it unusable
in important respects. I went to the genius bar (unscheduled), told the genius
guy I spilled water on it. He was a bit surprised, said that no one ever
admits to doing that, and gave me a new phone, for free.

~~~
patrickk
iPhones and iPods have LCI (liquid contact indicators) built into them. It's a
little white spot that turns red if exposed to moisture. Often, the LCI can be
triggered for all sorts of reasons (not just dropping your phone in a puddle
either, think a few drops of rain etc.)

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3425> (applies to macs and keyboards but the
same point remains)

People tend to get very hostile when there's some problem with their iPhone
and get denied service due to the LCI being triggered, even if that isn't the
root cause of the current problem. Hence the genius guy's surprise and over-
generous response.

(Disclaimer: former Apple employee)

