Lots of food available to grab anytime. If you’ve been here long enough, you may also be able to transfer to another department. Very easy to gain weight, and high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and high cholesterol come as a package.

I escaped from here at the beginning of last year. If you’re indirect staff (HR, testing, peripheral engineering, and the like),

most positions here feel like semi-retirement. If you don’t care too much about money,

then it might be bearable.

For on-site positions (operators, production control, quality control, and engineering), I suggest you switch to another company directly.

Production control and quality control are responsibility-based positions, so your monthly salary is the same every month.

Going to work becomes so pointless that even payday stops feeling worth caring about.

Engineering, meanwhile, has to cover all machinery and equipment, big or small, and you have to know how to repair everything.

To be honest, the pressure is pretty high. I-Mei has so many different products that you need to understand, repair, and adjust every type of machine.

On top of that, the operators’ skill level is very poor. They mess with the machines randomly, are difficult to train, and many of them think they know everything. It can make you want to kill someone while repairing the machines.

The boss also loves transferring people around for no reason. If you think transfers are a way to learn lots of different things,

then welcome aboard. Because turnover is high and there’s no one available to use, transfers happen extremely frequently.

As long as the boss knows who you are, congratulations—your career here will become incredibly “fulfilling.”

You can learn many things you would never have imagined wanting to understand in your entire life.

The employee meals contain an excessive amount of oil and salt, and feel like they’re free.

Management jokingly calls them “premium pig feed.” Employees often eat defective products from the factory or ingredients with strange odors.

The ultra-long-shelf-life frozen foods reported in the news before were supposedly also served in employee meals.

I heard things were changed later, but after eating there for a while, I gave up and started preparing my own food.

The gifts for the three major holidays are company products, and the prizes at the spring banquet aren’t very good either.

As I recall, the grand prize was roughly at the level of a TV or similar product.

The employee trip is organized separately by each department, with a NT$500 discount.

The year-end bonus is about one month’s salary, so annual pay is roughly 13 months’ salary.

By the way, performance reviews don’t have much impact, so the long-time employees here love slacking off.

Because the money isn’t affected much, while the work can become much easier.

There are basically no benefits either—worse than the standard 14 months’ pay offered by tech companies or other traditional manufacturers.

The only advantage is probably that the boss cares a lot about saving face. As long as the company gets caught in a labor inspection,

it will follow the law extremely strictly. So if you dare to report violations, you don’t really have to be afraid.

Finally, unless you majored in food science and really want to enter the food industry but can’t find another food manufacturer, consider this place as a last resort.

I’ve heard quality control staff say that their salaries are relatively high for the industry—high enough for an average person to find—and most departments don’t require shift work.

However, the work is correspondingly more demanding and stressful. Everyone has to handle multiple roles; a position that would require three people at another company is handled by one person here.

In quality control, apart from the department heads, the faces of the staff are basically replaced every year.

Production control is similar: new faces appear every few years. Basically, if you want a promotion, you only need to stay longer than everyone else.

To be honest, if you want to earn NT$700,000–800,000 a year here, you might as well go straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and work as an operator.

You have to stay extremely late every day, waiting for the boss to finish meetings.

(I heard they have to wait until at least 8:00 p.m. and see whether they’ve received the emperor’s favor before they can leave.)

TSMC operators work a two-days-on, two-days-off schedule. You only have to work shifts, and there’s no management pressure.

Their annual pay easily exceeds that of a section-manager-level employee here, leaving this place unable to even see their taillights.

Finally, I have to criticize HR. If you have questions, make sure to ask your direct supervisor.

HR just makes things up and tries to trick you into joining so they can pad their recruitment numbers.

Every time a new operator asks questions, they’re so naively optimistic.

“I heard you get off at 5 p.m. here.” “I heard the on-site work is automated and very easy to learn.” “I heard the salary is NT$X ten-thousand.” Every time, after asking the old employees while working, their faces show that they no longer want to do the job.

That’s about it. If I could turn back time, I wouldn’t even come to the interview.