Apple

Best pay rate you could probably get as a manual QA tester in Europe. The recruiting company paid for my accommodation during my stay (contractor), which adds an important bonus at the end of the month.

Canteens provide a variety of food at a fair price. You have three of those (two big, one small), so you will always find some seats for you and your colleagues. Vegetarian meals are available every day. Fish is served around twice a week, and the rest of the time is Western food. You also have dedicated Asian dishes available throughout the week.

Soup and desserts/smoothies are also available the whole week.

Overtime is only on the basis of volunteerism. You receive an email when overtime is scheduled and just tick the days you are willing to come to work (or you can tick nothing and not participate). On Sundays, the canteens are closed, though, so the company will order pizza for everyone. There is usually more than enough, and a good variety.

Almost no meetings, which can be put in the pros for some people, as you don't waste your time in useless meetings.

Several issues which I believe need to be detailed here if you consider moving all the way to Cork and work here.

Please note that as a Localization QA, you are not considered an Apple employee – you will be paid by an external company. I worked there for 5 months, not my first QA loc experience. My first few weeks might have been the most disappointing.

I started off with being assigned an old iMac and MacBook Pro. The iMac was not prepared and contained data from a previous employee. By the end of my stay, it was reaching its limit (the thing dated from 2008!). The MacBook Pro keyboard layout did not match my language. I always used it with an external full keyboard. Getting some accessories can be a challenge, and you might have to hunt those around the floor, one person directing you to another. Hardware is not located in one single place.

You would expect a rigorous training for working at Apple, but all they do is make you sit at your desk for a month or so, reading local wiki pages about the various processes and tools used in the localization department. Reading all day, every day, without a single human training. Only after that month or so you will be able to actually work, after passing some kind of evaluation.

The lack of regular trainings (which employees should go through once every few months to refresh good practices) makes it so that lots of people log incredibly bad bug reports, absolutely not matching the standards the evaluators have been hammering down on you during the evaluation. You will often receive bugs to verify, bugs logged by long-term employees, and you will get mad trying to decipher, understand, and reproduce what you will be reading; you will be asked to verify bugs for languages other than your own too, so if details are missing, it will be a pain.

The work itself is neither challenging nor interesting. But that is to be expected. What I hated the most are short little jobs they send you during the day. You will receive these at random times, when a lead needs to have something verified. You are in the middle of your work, and then receive a check which needs to be completed almost always ASAP. They are usually quick to complete. Usually. And you will receive several in a single day. If you hate being disturbed during your work, you will not love these.

A word on the tools and the Apple bug database. All tools, and their database, seem to be proprietary. Which means, during your time at Apple localization, you will only be learning new skills about how to use Apple tools. You will not be able to bring those skills to another job, which greatly limits the interest from a QA point of view. Several tools are developed from inside the department, with limited support, and suffer regularly from bugs. The database is a bit of a mess – many components, code names, useless fields, make it really not user-friendly, which is funny when you think it's Apple we are speaking about. Also, because of the way it works, many bugs (including bugs you logged yourself) won't be visible to you – which will lead to a lot of time wasted investigating and logging duplicated issues.

The previous point, about duplicates, could be avoided with the support of QA leads. But it won't. QA leads are leads only by title. They are more like facilitators, assigning test checklists and bugs to verify, collect test reports, and answer questions. They should provide a list of existing US and all languages bugs upon sending daily test details (US bug = originating from US teams, often you don't have the privileges to see them, but leads can). They also should check the software build, try and install it, make sure all is okay, and not waste QAs' time in case it is broken. But all you will get in the morning is the build they want you to install and test, and that it "needs to be completed today."

The above may have an explanation with the whole "QA lead" position. The QA lead is not dedicated to a single project or two. He will act as a lead-facilitator, but will still receive QA test assignments himself, to complete by end of day like other QAs. This is infuriating from a QA PoV; a lead should focus on his project, become a specialist at it, check the validity of the builds, provide info on existing bugs, spend his time updating and writing new checklists, and project wiki pages (both often out of date) etc. Instead, he has this QA work he needs to do, and often you feel like you are disturbing him with your questions and inquiries (which I can understand). You quickly stop asking and improvise, which is not good.

Which brings us to another topic – leadership and HR skills. Absolutely terrible. Like I said above, with the exception of one or two guys, QA leads have no leadership skill. They will not convey any feeling of purpose, energy, or motivation. Just do this, and remember it needs to be completed by end of day. No charisma. Same for some managers. The very rare meetings (where you learn nothing new, nor the status of the projects, nothing) are terribly awkward, with a passive manager, almost whispering to the audience. No sense of involvement, of interesting details, or feedback makes days look and feel like yesterday and so on.

I guess I was unlucky with some desk neighbors. The one in front of me used to remove his shoes and/or socks. I should not have to deal with this at work. Odors, lots of noise (people's mobile phones, or uneducated noisy people speaking loudly) are daily issues and a real source of stress. No policy at all to make employees comfortable. And because of this temporary location, it was constantly either too cold or too warm.

Yes, the location is an important topic. First, know that at the moment I posted this, the QA loc folks are working in the backyard of the otherwise great Apple campus at Cork, in porta-cabins. Their area is being renovated since almost a year now. Not sure when it will be completed. As I left, it was still a mess and underway. That explains the constant either cold or hot situation. There is no airflow in these things. You either open the windows or keep them closed.

The Apple campus is located in Ireland. Cold and rainy. In Cork, so even colder and wetter. On top of a hill, battered by the four winds, like at an airport. There is nothing around; it is absolutely dead. The city is at a good 40-50 minutes walk. If you need to go to the bank or buy something during lunch, forget it, unless you have a car. It is a most depressing area, poor, littered. The Apple campus is like something out of place, modern, undergoing a big renovation process. There was a gipsy camp next door at some point.

Thankfully, the canteens are excellent. Rarely disappointed by the food, at a mostly affordable price – I don't know about "real" Apple employees, but you get nothing free nor any discount at the canteens. With the exception of water, nothing's free, fruits included (50c piece).

About the other advantages at Apple – well, none. Kind of expected as a contractor, but even if you become a full-time localization employee, you get localization advantages, which are pretty standard. But none of Apple's. Like, buying devices (iPad, MacBook, iPhone...) at a discount price: not for you. There is a gym, and a fitness room somewhere on the campus. Awesome? Nope, not for localization folks either. I don't know what else the "real" Apple employees get access to.

Apple should personally look into what is happening within the loc department and make some audits.

Hire people with talent, develop a culture, train your people, and reward your employees.