Apple

Experience at Apple will look good on your CV.

1. To schedule an interview with the team leader was a nightmare. The agency had to reschedule the interview 3 times because every time I joined the Zoom call, the team leader was not present. When the agency contacted him asking for the reason why he did not attend the interview, he said that he was busy that day. At that moment, I noticed how disorganized the Search Quality department was.

When the team leader finally decided to interview me, he just told me that he would send me a case study and that if I passed this test, I would have a panel interview with the US team. In other words, the responsibility for my hiring was transferred to the extended team.

After passing the case study, I was interviewed by at least 10 people on the US team, an extremely long and tiring process where you just repeated your background to 10 different people.

1. After 2 months of this whole interview process, I was hired as a “contractor”. If you need an Employment Pass to work at Apple, RUN! They promise they'll give you the permanent role, but it's all a LIE! In my fourth month working at Apple, all my colleagues who were under the Employment Pass didn't have their contracts renewed, so I already knew what my future would be.

2. If you are hired to cover someone on maternity leave, DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME! One of my colleagues had a 1-year contract and she was hired to cover a person who was on maternity leave. The moment the girl came back from maternity leave, this colleague had her contract canceled without any further notice.

3. When I joined the team, the team leader didn't even know which market I was hired for. During my 1 year working at Apple, I never felt part of the team. I was constantly chasing the team leader and asking for feedback and more work to do, and he was ghosting me all the time. Maybe for him, I was a contractor and irrelevant to the team.

4. My team leader was very offended when I asked for 1 week of annual leave. Back at that time, it was Covid, and I wanted to take AL when Singapore was opening the travel bubbles as I wanted to see my family in Europe. One day we had a team meeting where he said to the team that I was the last person he would allow to go overseas because it was too dangerous to leave Singapore, as we didn’t know if the government would close borders again.

5. The work itself is extremely boring and nonsensical. Apple works with a vendor, and your role is to audit their work. We need to escalate issues to the engineering team; however, I never see the issues that we’ve raised be fixed, so it feels that no one cares about what the Search Quality team was doing.

6. On my last day and as expected, my team leader didn’t give me any guidance regarding the handover of the equipment that I had in my house. After 1 month since I left Apple, the team lead messaged me asking for my MacBook password since they needed to format my laptop so the new joiners could use it. Apple is the biggest tech company in the whole world, and you don’t have an IT department that can format a MacBook, and you are asking for a personal password to access the laptop?