I can only speak for me, I worked as a Genius from 2007-14, so I was leaving as she was coming in. From my buddies that are still there or who left some time later, most of them say she made stuff worse or turned their managers into metric/number bots.
Angela gutted what used to be a highly treasured rite of passage: genius training.
No longer do geniuses train at Apple’s secret genius room classrooms in Cupertino (and later Austin and Atlanta). Nope, now they train Geniuses in the crazy Apple store’s breakroom through pretaped videos and PDFs, very nearly the same material that’s available to independent, 3rd-party authorized technicians through GSX (working in IT, I can still access this as we have a self-servicing account).
An experience I treasured in 2008, going to Cupertino for a month, getting to meet Woz one evening at the Outback Steakhouse (he buys steaks to go for his puppies), and waiting behind Steve Jobs buying his blueberry muffin at Caffe Macs with Jony Ive right by his side... this is all gone for anyone new, and Angela green-lit it.
I know the program doesn't intrinsically scale when you're hiring hundreds of Genii per month instead of dozens... but here's the real problem: Geniuses today learn how to fix your Mac or iPhone by watching videos and PDFs, if they even get to fix it- most of the laptops get shipped to Flextronics for repair. In my era, most Genius hires had a good knowledge of computers, now they tend to promote people from the floor with good sales numbers and strong net promoter feedback, which isn't bad - but there's not nearly as many diehard Mac geeks as there were.
The experience of having a veteran Apple trainer like Jim Bontempo who was there in the 1990s showing you exactly how a blackstick spudger should feel as it removes a connector and the tension of said move- all gone now. The insider knowledge that you need to feel the edge of the display clamshell for precise alignment with your finger, not your eyes as you tighten down the T6 screws, gone. Nifty tricks on how to handle stubborn ZIFs and screws... gone.
By the way, any Genius trained after about mid 2018 is learning on your stuff... not the training Macs we got to destroy/tinker with in Cupertino. If Delta Airlines did the same cost-cutting move, a novice, Day 1 pilot could be flying your plane. Thanks FAA for protecting us from folks like Angela.
Truly sad, but I suppose, inevitable.
And yes, they pay geniuses a lot less than they did in the old days - thanks to Angela. I left and became a corporate IT manager, we make a boring SAAS software package that nobody outside the industry knows about, but my salary almost tripled, and nights/weekends are off.
Bottom line, her creativity is the same as most MBAs... "cut any costs and take credit for doing so, push your best people harder, replace them with worser ones, make the work boring as a byproduct." She lacks the vision of Ron Johnson, and I do think her gender and Burberry fashion pedigree secured her spot because Apple thought it was going into the gold watch selling business.
