Job duties: Patent engineer

Working hours: There are two schedules. Mondays and Fridays are 9:00–18:00, while Tuesdays through Thursdays are 9:00–19:30.

Salary structure: Base salary: 27,000

　　　　　Overtime pay: Is there such a thing? How come I didn’t know about it? I heard it’s a responsibility-based system, so there’s no overtime pay~

　　　　　Work bonus: Determined by the manager, between 1,000 and 5,000. University graduates get 1,000, and master’s graduates get 3,000. That’s all I know.

　　　　　Perfect-attendance bonus: 1,000

　　　　　Performance bonus: 2,000 for 10 points, 7,000 for 15 points

　　　　　Engineers’ basic performance requirement: 10 points per month (in principle, one case equals one point)

　　　　　Salary deductions: If a case contains more than three typos, 100 is deducted from your salary......although I’ve never been penalized.

　　　　　Labor and health insurance: High salary, low reported income! For example, my base salary is 27,000. I actually checked: normally, the insured salary should be reported at the next higher level, but the firm reported it as only 26,200? That level’s amount (26,200 or 26,400—I checked it once but forgot...) means 800 in retirement-fund contributions and protection is lost.

＊Be aware of the firm’s tricks. Performance bonuses and perfect-attendance bonuses are clearly regular payments stipulated by the Labor Standards Act (that is, money earned by meeting your own work conditions), so they must be paid. However, the firm gives them to you in red envelopes on payday. If you resign, the firm will not give you this money.

　　　　　Retirement benefits: Since the performance and perfect-attendance bonuses are not deposited into your account at all, there is basically no way to ensure your retirement security. Anyone thinking of staying at this firm for a long time should consider carefully. Personally, I would rather be a citizen who pays taxes on the full amount of my salary, because my retirement benefits would also be better protected.

The firm’s owner, supervisors, and general working conditions:

Basically, the owner is a typical exploitative employer, right? Why the question mark? Because everyone’s definition of an exploitative employer is a little different...perhaps some people would not consider this to be exploitative.

The firm requires employees to leave later on Tuesday through Thursday evenings. In the morning, when the owner or the owner’s wife arrives, you have to greet them. When leaving, you have to seek the approval of the supervisor, the owner, and the owner’s wife. The supervisor makes it sound nice by saying that, in principle, you can leave at 18:00 if there is nothing going on, but the workload assigned to you makes it basically impossible to leave that early. There was also a period when the end of the workday was 22:00. The supervisor would say, “It’s 10 o’clock already. The owner is getting off work and can’t wait for us. Have you finished processing the cases?” If you hadn’t finished, they would say, “Take them home and do them!” It wasn’t Friday—what time did they expect people to finish? And what about overtime pay? In the end, this was one of the reasons I resigned. During that period, everyone left at 10 and took cases home to work on, yet the owner said during a meeting, because our performance was poor, “Are we getting our money’s worth from you?” So I resigned. Then, on the resignation application I filled out, I was required to sign a statement “waiving legal rights”—in other words, to waive any claims under the Civil Code, Criminal Code, and Labor Standards Act. Even someone who does not understand the law would know that this is unreasonable, right?

That is why I put a question mark after “exploitative employer.” I believe many people in Taiwan would say that being worked hard for a while to gain experience is worthwhile, but this is exactly how employers become accustomed to exploiting people.

Advantages:

The supervisor of the patent department has a certain level of expertise. New employees receive training directly from him; for a full two months, they are almost entirely in training and only very occasionally provide work support. The training covers search techniques and how to draft patent claims. The firm is also extremely strict—even typos result in deductions, so you can imagine how strict they are with themselves. As I mentioned earlier, this firm is relatively busy, so people who want to learn can stay here. Once you have developed sufficient skills, I believe you can earn a decent salary at another firm as well. The key is having a certain level of efficiency and quality. For everyone’s reference.