After Apple

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 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 using MOSX). All of that, I really could have done without, personally. I needed to know how to log the calls, answer the phone, setup repairs and all of that. The majority of the class I just browsed the web and goofed off in my own little world, waiting for the tidbits to come up. The instructor tried to test me now and again and I answered every question in far more detail than was sane. She stopped doing that after a while.

The first day on the phone was … interesting. I had a period where I listened in with someone and during that time I wound up helping him on calls. When my time came, he wasted no time in getting a book, putting me into the queue, and leaning back. Wherever you are, damn you Billy, you cocky mofo. Yet, I did it, and kept doing it for years. He was right about that, at least.

The greatest challenge in technical support is matching the level of the customer. Some folks see windows, menus, and icons while others see their own little world with their own little names. For one fellow, the system still had lines of text. Line one was the menu bar, line two the window’s title, line three the toolbar, and so forth. That was a very interesting night, and oh, it did last into the darkness of the night, that one.

It’s hard enough to have to change your dialect of stupid for every person that calls in, but it’s even harder to talk to someone about a PowerBook when you’ve never seen one for more than five minutes, and even that was in a small lab across two walls, a field of cubes, a moat of break rooms and vending machines, and past the Gauntlet Run of Managers, asking why you’re mobile. Oh, I know why they put them there. They’re expensive and easy to steal. It was just quite annoying when you’re talking to someone who can only type numbers and you are unaware that they possess the only Mac that actually has a working number lock key (that, too, was a fun night).

On the upside, there was no hardware troubleshooting other than “it’s broken and I’m sending you a box.” At that point, it was more customer troubleshooting. People didn’t like to be without their machine long enough to fix it, but didn’t want to live with it broken, either.

I’m going to be without my computer for a week?! It’s a business critical machine! I can’t be without it!

It’s a business critical machine, this portable. So that’s why you don’t have a backup of your data or a spare machine to use in the mean time. It, and all that’s on it, is just that important to you. You can’t run your business without it, and you have no way of replacing it should something happen to it, even temporarily. I understand. Go to hell.

Part of it is understandable. Machines cost money, so do backup schemes, and so does that $3 coffee you have every day and that $50K SUV you drive. It’s about priorities in the end, and Americans in general are very confused about priorities (“We’re scared!” → prove George Orwell to be a fortune-teller). If something is important to you, you spend money to make it reliable. If you cannot make it reliable, then you make it redundant. It’s a life lesson more than a computer lesson. Some folks have two cars so that one can be in the shop. Some folks have a spare room outside their home for guests and for staying in should the house need work. Some folks have a backup of their data and another computer to use it on should the primary one fail. All of those folks are prepared. Everyone else will get it in the ass one day and yell at me for their lack of planning. It’s part of the job, I discovered.

All told, the job wasn’t really challenging. I found myself coming in to work late, getting in from lunch late, missing breaks, etc. All the classic signs of being completely tired of the job. So I went to my manager and said, “I know servers. How do I get into that team?” A few weeks later there was an opening and I was told to interview.

AppleShare AppleCare

So, within the first year I was off supporting PowerBooks (you people are crazy) and into supporting AppleShare IP and Mac OS X Server (you people are crazier). Despite my every attempt at leaving that organization over the course of the next four years, that small group was the endpoint of my career at Apple. This happened for two reasons. The first was that we didn’t support other products at all, thus specializing my skill set in the eyes of hiring managers and making me unattractive for anything else. The second is that it was a good-paying job that required very little active thought. Most problems with ASIP were resolved by pointing people to one of three Knowledge Base articles: 16145, aka. you installed a software update without knowing that ASIP cared; 88023 aka. this is all I was going to do anyway; and 90013 aka. this, too, is all I was going to do.

Most problems in ASIP related to a corrupt AppleShare PDS file or a corrupt user database. Everything else pretty much just worked, except Macintosh Manager. Macintosh Manager is the most evil, vile, putrid pile of shit to ever come out of Cupertino, and I’m including OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, and At Ease for Workgroups when I say this. On the one hand, it did everything that administrators wanted it to do, and did it well. On the other, there was no human way to diagnose failure other than running down a list of steps until something worked. There were no indications, no signs from above, no flashy lights, not even ambiguous numeric error codes. It just broke. I got to the point that if someone said Macintosh Manager was busted I’d just say: “Run through 88023 and that’ll fix it. It’s all I’m going to do anyway and you can do it offline. I’ll give you a case incase it doesn’t work.” They didn’t call back on those cases. I checked. The article supports this view, too. There are no indications, just steps.

Mac OS X Server added a good deal of confusion into the pot for the folks that had been supporting ASIP all of that time, but it wasn’t terribly much for me since I’d just come from running Solaris- and Linux-based web and mail servers. It had standard Unixy underpinnings and server processes and was easy to understand at that level as a result. The fuzzy areas are just where Apple changed things. Learn those things and Server is just a tame little kitten that happens to randomly vomit on you when you pet it. You live with it because it’s just so damn cute and cuddly.

So, it wasn’t terribly hard to just build up and maintain a pool of knowledge and chug along day after day, dealing with the highs and lows in the firestorm of a call center. The highs are honest-to-goodness technical problems where you can get into the system and see what’s gone ill. The lows are the repeat calls or the repeat callers.

One fellow has a production server die without a backup server or a backup of his data. Boo hoo. I’ll fix the computer, but you didn’t do your job and I can’t fix that, so I’m sure you’ll yell at me for half an hour about “it’s a Mac, I shouldn’t have to back up” or some nonsense and then slam the phone down. I’ll wait. Another has a very basic phone support contract and demands a bug to be fixed and the binary mailed to him in an hour. Umyeahno. Yet another has done literally everything in the book to solve a problem except those things remotely relevant to the issue at hand. Ahh, shotgun troubleshooting. You forgot your password, resetting the PRAM will not help you. I know, it’s a Mac, and resetting the PRAM is the Vulcan Behavior-Control Grip, but it just ain’t gonna do it this time.

The list goes on. Dozens of calls a day for four years. I’d prefer not to multiply that out, really. That would be depressing.

And none of this is a critical slight against the people calling in as much as a lament that many of them were getting paid 50% more than what I was and had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Such is the trap of working in technical support. You must be a super-tech to be useful, but there’s so many needed that the budget becomes slim on a per-person basis to get such people. To give you an idea about that, how much would you expect to pay a consultant (one man, not a company) that had even most of the following skills?

• Mac OS 9.0 to Mac OS X 10.4
• Mac OS X Server 10.2 to 10.4
  • AFP, FTP, NFS, SMB
  • DHCP, NetBoot
  • DNS
  • Firewall, NAT, VPN
  • iChat Server
  • Mail, Web, Webmail, Blogs, Podcasts
  • Open Directory, Windows PDC
  • Print Server
  • QuickTime Streaming Server
  • Software Update Server
  • Managed Client, Macintosh Manager
• Apple Remote Desktop 1, 2, and 3
• Xsan 1.0 to 1.3
• Xserve G4/G5 (including service)
• Xserve RAID (including service)

That’s a damn fine spread of Macintosh knowledge that you don’t see very often at all. That’s also the range of topics that the higher members of Apple technical support have. There is no specialization. And yet, with all of those skills (and more), we received phone center wages and the regular abuse of people whose jobs we should have.

I really don’t mean that lightly. It was a staple of the daily calls to get someone to whom you had to explain what a server was and why they bought one. Or, a variant, why changing the server’s IP address is generally a bad thing, and that would make a DHCP address on the server a very bad thing. I don’t hold anything against those individuals, I just don’t think they should have a job administering a server if those basic concepts aren’t in place. I mean, really, would you trust your company’s servers to someone that had to be told what DNS was? That would be my point. People whose jobs I should have.

They were also jobs I didn’t want. Server administration is a whole other animal, to me. It’s face-to-face support with people you’ll see again and again, and you can’t become the bad guy to to many of them or your job is on the line. Technically, it sounds like a good deal. Practically, it’s politics-laden, and I try my best to avoid jobs where there are politics involved in any significant amount because, frankly, I’m an egomaniacal perfectionist asshole and 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.

I didn’t have that problem in AppleCare, though. The majority of the people there suffered the same lot in life that I did. Most everyone worked at a system administration job and got laid off, needed quick work, and Apple was hiring people for the consumer products. We filtered up through the ranks and found ourselves locked in the back room with no career exit. It’s like the roach motel for server guys. That said, it also meant that we all had similar backgrounds and interacted similarly. Politics rarely came up, except for the real politics. When you put that many Libertarians in a room and actually get them to work, they’re bound to talk about their political misconceptions as they go (as I said: asshole).

Bennies

I can’t talk about the ills of AppleCare and support jobs with talking about the good. I mean, obviously, if things were completely bad I simply would have quit long ago. There are people that appreciate us, and there are good customers that call in a lot that we know by name, or even voice. There are the great stories about people that almost ditched the Mac for the sake of one or two issues and a phone agent got a sudden burst of caring and fixed absolutely everything that person had wrong and won the person over for life (or at least a few years).

The absolute best thing you can do for someone at Apple that helps you is to send a note to a manager about the call. Long or short, it doesn’t matter, just ask for an address to send it to. Much like how only people with problems call AppleCare, so all that they get are the problems, managers can get that way with their agents — only the disasters come in. If you like what you see, send in a note and things will go well for the agent.

As for environment, well, it’s relaxed. Very relaxed. 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.

Then there’s the real benefits. Great healthcare, 401k with matching, ESPP, a gym, on-site cafeteria (that’s started to really suck ass in the past six months), and other things really rounded out the package.

Holy Quagmire, Batman! It’s Time to Jet!

It was a rather kushy job with good benefits, all considered. After some time, though, it started to become very clear that some of those immortal people had worked their way into management as well, and were doing some very stupid things. Over time, the stupidity compounded and, well, things became unpleasant enough for me that I tried to leave several times.

The Apple Retail Store opened in Austin during my first career-induced depression and I applied and fought like hell for it. I worked my way to the final interview on that one, only to get passed over for other transfers. I tried hanging around, making my name known, all the fun tricks, but nothing came of it. Time and again I applied as Genius openings came up and got nothing. Well, almost nothing. One day I did, actually, get a call back from them for the job, complete with an offer. This was right around the end of the year and their offer was below my new salary after a respectable raise from a mid-year job change. This was also after they slid the Genius scale back quite a bit, too. Needless to day, more work for less money is something I try to avoid, so I did.

I looked into other departments along the way, firing off resumes when things got weird or upsetting, but no one bit. I’d been specialized far too long and wasn’t good for anything else, it would appear. Try as I did to find happiness within Apple, it really didn’t happen.

Life Inside AppleCare

Now there are some jobs that inspire happiness and stability. Jobs where you can live out your life doing them day after day and not feel the urge to run away from them because they’re killing you. Those jobs are very few within a support organization, and that includes AppleCare. The majority of people in the organization are doing some form of tedious grunt work or another. Either grunt work on the phone, or with email or chat, or making those systems work. Once you’ve gone through the birthing period in your job where you learn what to do, it’s one unimpressive day after another with the exact same duties giving you the exact same problems from the customers and the processes.

It’s really all some form of grunt work unless you’re in management, and then unless you’re one of those that actually wanted that job, it’s nothing short of meeting hell. In all of my time at Apple, I’ve learned one thing about Apple management: the ones that go to the most meetings win. What they win, I don’t know, but there’s sure as hell some contest they’re having that they’re not letting the grunts in on because over half of the day for every manager I had was taken up in some form of meeting or another. I cannot fathom the level of boring that job must be, especially since I sat in on a few and saw how little got done in an hour. For this very reason, there were mini-posters hung in various cubes around the building of the “Hold a Meeting!” joke (intentionally-bad grammar and all). If my productivity fell to that kind of low for half a day, you can be sure I’d be told there was a problem with that. It would probably be in a meeting.

The key jobs to land, the ones where you don’t die a slow inner death, number less than fifty. These are the cushy technical jobs where you actually make some form of a difference; you see issues coming in and gather them together for reporting, and do basic research and testing for them. As new things come out, you get the data first and have to learn it completely. Once you’ve learned it, you use all of that information in supporting it. These people, however, are both quite happy with their jobs and very much immortal.

Which isn’t really to say that it’s a bad place to work, outside of those jobs. If I didn’t have something better outside Apple I would have continued ignoring the gaping faults in the processes and kept doing my tedious and unchallenging little jobs. The benefits are the best I’ve ever had, I enjoy spending time around my peers within the group, and the job is really quite easy once you’ve handled all the basic issues. All things considered, AppleCare is a very stable employment, very easy to learn and do on a day-to-day basis, gives unbelievable benefits for that effort, and will eventually add a pervasive, inch-thick layer of I-don’t-give-a-fuck to your thought processes. It’s just how you survive. Really, though, if you want a place to settle into, it’s a good one and I can’t think of one better.

Unless you don’t want to settle in. Back to that promotion cap, there. There were other options for me within Apple, sure. I could have gone into technical writing (I have my fair share of Knowledge Base articles under my belt), but that’s a dead-end from day one. I was tempted to go into sales, but I value my soul. There’s the compromise of an Inside Systems Engineer (Inside SE) job within the sales organization, but that job is a quandary. On one side, you need all the knowledge in the world to perform it and answer every wild question a customer will come up with, and have to have a response to every reason given for why a solution is not for him. On the other, you will otherwise never use that knowledge in real life. You will be stagnant unless you get out into the field and use that knowledge on a real installation, but field SEs are one of those “unless they die” positions that you rarely get, unless the company expands, and then there are others on that waiting list for when that happens.

Writing, selling, pitching. Outside of moving up technically, that was it for the opportunities that lie ahead for the wise and learned phone jock. Moving up technically came to one of two choices: within Austin, or Move Out There. I had a shot at some jobs Out There that I might have taken up, had they not been in the Valley. I made a better-than-decent wage in Austin. Somehow, I don’t see the value in getting a $20K raise and having a lower standard of living, just to try and move ahead within a company. I don’t love Apple enough to take a personal hit for the desperate chance of moving ahead. The two jobs I could have had were Inside SE and Software QA, and I know a couple of people in QA. QA is yet another wait-for-someone-to-die job and one of them has been at it for several years, waiting.

I was tired of waiting. My ego yelled at me that I needed something better for myself than clocking in, being yelled at, clocking out, and doing it again. I needed to dream again. I needed something that wouldn’t stagnate me, trap me, and keep me in a rut. I felt like a pod in The Matrix, just powering the machine. I had to break free.

Breaking Free

So one day a friend of mine comes to me with some news. A family member will give him an undetermined lump of cash to start a business venture. Find a crew and an idea, pitch and refine it, and you’re golden. As my friend said then, it’s really amazing how quickly you can come up with business ideas when someone’s willing to throw money in your face if you get a good one.

We went over many plans, from mail servers to spam filter boxes (both overdone), to well-done hosting (thin profit margin), to various kinds of software for the web. Then we realized something, I think. The web is overdone. It’s the new frontier and everyone’s doing something magical for the web and … the core applications on the desktop are stagnating. So we identified a few places that could use some repair, drafted up an assassination plan for the market leaders, and got the cash. Expect to hear more of that soon.

Once that was cemented and all the work done, it was a matter of making either the dumbest decision I’ve ever made, or the smartest. Apple is such an incredible place to work, it really is. You’re surrounded by great people and great products. Sometimes you get the inside scoop on a product or issue or feature or whatever, and it really feels nice to know that. (Often, we’re clueless about such things, as JC mentioned in his Rumors at the Bar article at Mac Geekery.) If I want to know if there’s a bug on something, I look. If I want to know how something works, I have places to ask. If I want to test some issues, there’s a lab full of hardware to test it on. If you ignore the whole emotional scarring and limited career bits, it’s a really great little place to be.

The issue is ignoring those things. When it was very clear that I’d be a support monkey for at least two more years, it was no longer a decision, but a sad, dirty job that had to be done.

About Apple

For all of the specific ills of the groups I’ve been in, I do love the company. I see many, many places for improvement throughout the company, but I have no true hope of real change there. Too many immortal fools are embedded in management positions in key places for any real change to come. Too many “professional managers” are at work trying to make noise for themselves and their own promotions for real, honest change to be effected. There will always be a dead-end in the promotion line for technical workers because of the sheer number of good workers that Apple Austin has working for them. I say this with honesty: my co-workers rock. They know what they’re doing, and most of them deserve far more than what they have. The catch is that it’s very satisfying to just get into a rut and work the same job all day, so they’ll never make the noise needed to get anyone’s attention for promotion paths. There’s something very sedating about getting paid decently for answering phones, and a sedated workforce is a complacent workforce, and a complacent workforce effects no change.

So I did, for me. Part of me regrets it, part of me is scared shitless, and part of me wonders why it took so damn long to do it.

Do I have faith in the company, living and working inside of it, seeing the dirty laundry and the wild parties? Unequivocally, yes. The proof is in one’s actions, isn’t it? The software company that I’m leaving Apple to work on will be a Mac-only house, like Panic or Omni. There is nothing else I would rather do, and I see a very strong future for Apple in this world and I’m going to put my bread and butter in their hands and code like hell for them on my own.

I am no longer an Apple employee, and while part of me regrets that, I’ll always have Apple on the brain and will run this wagon until the horses die, God willing.