After Apple

One of the things that really annoyed me when I worked in AppleCare was the Knowledge Base. We were told when we started working there that it was the end-all and be-all of troubleshooting knowledge, but most of the time it came up with printer cleaning articles for an LW 16/600 rather than the answer to your question. In addition, the beast was slow. Very slow. Slow enough that if you used it on a call the other person would think you were “slow” for having to think that long. A lot of times, you felt like it.

The folks that had been working there for any amount of time before my class came in showed us that the Tech Info Library (TIL) was still online, internally. It was the precursor to the Knowledge Base and, yet, was more advanced, supporting boolean searches, and was both fast and accurate. So, the KB simply fell into disuse among internal users. Time and time again we were told not to use the older server and that it would go away someday, but, honestly, when something works you use it.

Then, one day, they stopped updating the TIL servers with new documents. While this was annoying, we wound up searching one and then the other instead of relying on the KB for everything. It really didn’t phase us. It was still only marginally slower to search the TIL and then the KB because the TIL was more accurate and faster, and it usually had the answer.

Seeing that that plan didn’t kill the practice, there were then the meetings. Some of the KB people came to our team meetings, then some of us went to theirs. Sometimes there’d be a survey or two, or some very unlucky soul would go around asking how it could be better, only to be greeted with the obvious, “Well, the article search could actually find articles, maybe?” We thought this was just general harassment and an attempt at understanding the social reasons for using old technology rather than that new-fangled piece of crap they were forcing on us. We thought wrong.

It’s an often-told story that when Jobs went around finding his first batch of suckers, his sales pitch was to ask them if they wanted a job, or to change the world. After working at Apple for any length of time you realize that this effectively means, “Would you like a salary you can live on, or are hopes and dreams good for you?” Pity the sucker that took that job, for he changed the world and ate crackers and soup.

What Steve really meant, though, outside of stiffing the poor bastard, was that Apple concentrates on creative talent and hutzpah rather than on the meager details of business or life. What matters is the gem, the gold, the shiny new thing that’s going to change the world, and all that little stuff that’s needed to get that done, well, some other fool’s handling that, working the magic, making it work so that you can work on The Next Big Thing.

Sadly, that bohemian view of what it is to work in the age of computing never quite left California.

Several years ago I heard the announcement that Apple would work with a contractor group in Bangladore and open up an Indian call center for AppleCare. The first words uttered in the room are, for the most part, not repeatable, but the groans and wails made one think someone had died. Thus began the great experiment.

For years, other companies had been outsourcing their labor to India for a dime on the dollar, at worst. Many companies had succeeded in doing this with minimal backlash from their customers, so it would appear that Apple felt it was time to try it, seeing as everyone was used to the idea from other companies. So they hired a firm, sent some folks out to train them, and then brought them online some time later. Shortly after that, every last human in AppleCare knew it was a mistake.

No one could understand them. Not the phone agents here, or the customers calling. I know I couldn’t get a word out of them that was remotely understandable. People who talk to these folks face-to-face forget that the telephone has the quality of an AM radio station — much is lost. It was not uncommon (and in my dealings with AppleCare post-departure, still isn’t) for the American agent to ignore everything the Indian agent did and just start over because he just couldn’t understand what had already been done. There are case notes, sure, but their written English wasn’t much better.

There’s been some talk lately about Apple and its infamous secrecy. The claims being bandied around state that because Apple is highly secretive that stock holders have little information about the company, not much less than partners that Apple is working with. For my part at Apple, I can say that those things are very, very true. Secrecy is insanely big at Apple, and it causes its own problems internally.

In AppleCare, we heard about products when the customer did. We crowded around the break room television set (we got lives feeds of all of the Steve events) and watched and waited for new items to come out. Every time something like iWeb was announced we’d groan “Oh, great, that’ll be hell to support…” and when we saw that Mac OS X got a little easier to use or an old feature request filled, we’d applaud the team that did it. It was odd, really. It was like AppleCare was a whole other company rather than a division. We had absolutely no general contact with the rest of Apple, especially product designers.

Sure, the Genius Bar has its share of crazy people, but technical support is where the loonies go from the convenience of their own asylum. There’s something about being able to call in to someone from your couch that makes a person feel empowered and intelligent, as if they were on the hotline to some secret base in the depths of a mountain stronghold asking the source of it all what could possibly be the problem. In reality it’s one lost monkey calling another, just without the poo flinging that normally comes with that.

Of course someone’s going to ask the big question after my previous rant: Does AppleCare Really Care? The answer is yes, they do.

Look, I left Apple on good terms for a career choice. A lot of what I wrote was put down for two reasons: because I needed to whine, seethe, and bitch after keeping that inside for four years; and because I wanted to let the folks on the other side know what their bad days and bad treatment of other human beings does to the people taking their crap all day. That’s it.

It does appear that a lot of people took it far too seriously and thought it was the whole picture. Not by far. If you’d like the whole picture, then I’ll spill what I can. Obviously, Apple is a notoriously secretive company, so I can’t share many specifics but I can give generalities and ambiguous examples. I can work with that.

Wow. I simply can’t believe the traffic that got. I was kind of kidding when I submitted it to Digg and Slashdot, but in both cases it hit the front page. The Digg guys seemed to get it about half the time, and the Slashdot guys got it about 10% of the time, which is generally on par for the respective sites.

Anyhow, in reading the questions and comments at various places that linked to the article, I’m seeing some common questions that I’ll address for the hell of it.

You sound arrogant and self-righteous, but were stuck in support for four years. Man up, Nancy.

This is true, I did write with that tone and am entirely capable of it. I am also venting, and would not have lasted four years if that’s how I treated people who called. To understand the disparity, you have to have worked a similar job (and most of us technical types have). You come in in the morning and the phone rings and it’s the same guy you got running the previous day. For some reason he went beyond what you’d said (his computer, his right) and did one more thing to it, causing it to go to pieces on him. So, you carefully explain why that did what it did and then bring him back to a working state, saying he should never do that again. He understands, hangs up, and does it again. Two hours later, a colleague gets a call from him and asks you what the heck is going on with him. Standard fare.

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.

Well, I've been pondering it for a while and a few weeks ago I finally gave notice. It's hard to leave, but there are better things for me out there.

I've been given the option of finishing out the week until Friday or just taking off since I've handed off all of my work. Is one week's pay worth it when there's something else waiting?

Well, when I do go, I have a very long entry I've been working on to post to this site, so watch for that in the next week.