Pros
*The pay is decent for a contract role *People in this contract position are allowed to work remotely a couple days a week, same as the Full-Time Employees (FTEs) *Management is generally flexible with hours and giving time off if you request it (though bear in mind any kind of PAID time off wasn’t an option, even if everyone is out of the office regardless because it’s a holiday)
Cons
*The relatively high (generally) hourly wage offered may seem enticing but I cannot in good conscience recommend this role to any experienced professional. The general vibe for contractors in this role seems to be that you feel very disposable and are not treated as important at all. Even during the interview process, I was ghosted twice: two times the Apple interviewer did not show up and left me sitting there having wasted 30 minutes of my time, and when the interviews were rescheduled they offered no apology or explanation. A lot of what they told me during the interview also seemingly turned out to not be the case at all: When I asked about onboarding, training, and general resources, I was told they had several onboarding resources and training and support and was assured I would not have a lot thrown at me at all at once. On my second day my boss was throwing multiple projects at me and I had to use my boss’ computer to do it because I still didn’t even have permissions set up and I was even given her password so I could log back in at her computer while my boss was in meetings, which I’m not sure is actually even acceptable company policy. I never had any free time to look at any of the internal wikis or documentation (which were largely out of date anyway) and at one point I asked another contractor who had been here for nearly a year if their experience was similar and they mentioned they didn’t think they had so much as looked at any of the resources in their entire tenure so far. (The same peer also told me their advice to me was that if I wanted to last here it also probably wasn’t a good idea to ask too many questions, which says a lot about the environment.) Furthermore, a lot of the internal tools we used were broken and it was also apparently it was my job to QA the tools for the engineers while I’m using them which added an extra layer of stress. So my experience was completely contrary to what I was told in the interviews, pretty much a sink or swim environment from day one. *I was told of a welcoming team environment during the interviews but in reality this seems to be the case only for the FTEs, NOT for contractors. For the FTEs they have their own separate office room from the contract staff and it did seem generally very lively and everyone was cracking jokes and seems to get along well whenever I needed to go there. For the contractor LPMs though, I recall the team environment as such: everyone is tired, frustrated, worn out, and barely speaks to each other. Outside of rare times where we all might be working on the same project, everyone sits at their desk and most days interpersonal communication does not happen at all. As part of my training curriculum (which again, I was not even given time to actually use), I was assigned a training buddy but they never once reached out to me and no one on the team ever once did anything to integrate me or make me feel welcome. The overall feel was that of a very alienating environment that doesn’t make you feel like you belong. *Culture of Surveillance: The office politics and gossip among the team felt at times very tangible. The walls have ears and eyes here and even if you don’t realize it feels like you are being watched and scrutinized. I had overheard a lot of talk about other people behind their backs at desks and in the break rooms, and on video calls that people take at their desks someone once mentioned something like “people aren’t at their desks today and going to get coffee and things”, so note that even if you only ever leave your desk to go on break, use the restroom, or get something to drink from the break room, apparently you have coworkers that act as the “desk police” and will make a note of it and tell others. This led to an extremely hostile feeling environment that felt stressful and psychologically damaging. *As for the environment itself, this is a project management job that takes place in a room that feels more like a tightly packed call center than an office. Desks are very close together so there’s no privacy, it’s extremely hot all the time, and the windows are frosted so no light gets in. Furthermore most people take video meetings at their desks and do not try to be quiet or use an “inside voice”, so basically imagine having to do complex projects with tight deadlines that are changing constantly using tools that don’t work, WHILE the person who sits across from you (which means they are literally like maybe 3 feet away) is borderline shouting at their computer screen in a meeting which can go on for at least a couple hours at a time. It’s no wonder I left with a headache every day. *Feedback or any kind of input for contractors seems basically non existent: if they don’t like you or decide you aren’t working out, there won’t be any performance convo or warning or any other kind of conversation about it, they can very easily and very legally just let you go suddenly and that’s that. Imagine the rug pulled out from under you at end of day while you work from home with no explanation or direct contact from apple, just from your agency who only provides a vague blanket statement and then once you’re gone you aren’t even allowed to ask questions or argue against it. One thing going into this role that seemed like a red flag for me was that if you check job boards you’ll see the exact LPM role for this position (with slightly different title or wording but on the same team) being posted CONSTANTLY, sometimes MULTIPLE times a month by multiple agencies for the same position over and over again, and I remember seeing how often the role is posted and thinking there’s no way they actually need to hire for this role as often as they do UNLESS they just continually swap people in and out like cogs in a machine: I won’t claim to have any insight into how the hiring process for these positions actually work but given my experience I can tell you it doesn’t seem hard to guess what's happening. Don’t fall for it.