Workplace reviews and discussion: 旺矽科技股份有限公司

The company benefits are good.

It is a good place for self-improvement.

The SOPs in the circuit board design department are extremely unclear and change constantly. When changes are made, the people responsible even deny having issued the instructions. There are almost as many managers as staff in the department, and over the past year and a half, nearly 50% of employees have resigned or taken leave of absence. Employees on leave have also indicated that they do not intend to return to the department after their leave ends.

The scope of work is broad. Although the main focus is outsourcing, all product categories (MLO/MLC/VPC/CPC) must be handled. Supervisors from any team can manage engineers on other teams at any time, and the deputy director (who also serves as the department manager) also intervenes in management. As a result, engineers often receive conflicting instructions while carrying out their tasks.

Training for new employees is very poor. Employees are expected to arrange their own training courses inside and outside the company. After employees request training, the managers deliberately assign projects or use excuses to obstruct them. After obstructing them several times, they criticize the employees for lacking ambition and for being unwilling even to arrange their own professional development.

Team leaders (section managers or deputy managers) are unwilling to answer team members’ questions. When handing over work, employees ask whether there are any special design requirements, but the managers do not respond. Only when the design is completed or nearly completed do they complain to the deputy director that the team member failed to follow the rules and demand revisions. After the revisions are made, however, the customer criticizes them for not having those rules, and the managers remain silent and pretend nothing happened. Some resources are available only through the managers. When people below raise questions or requests, the managers still do not respond. When engineers eventually find information and solve the problem on their own, the managers criticize the solution for not having been approved by the unit supervisor, then immediately stand up and call the deputy director, claiming that the engineer acted on their own. Team leaders also often complain to the deputy director that the people below them can never be trained properly and that they have to cover everything and everyone. They like prying into people’s privacy and then presenting employees’ personal affairs to the deputy director as prized conversation topics.

During interviews, the deputy director likes to use bonuses and overtime pay to negotiate salaries, but later says that bonuses are additional rewards and that employees should be grateful if the company is willing to give them anything. During regular work, he loves to conduct “briefings” and requires everyone to put down their work and listen. These briefings often last two to three hours; on the longest occasions, they have lasted the entire afternoon and even past the end of the workday. Under these circumstances, it is genuinely difficult to write the daily work report. If another department calls to discuss work during a briefing, the employee may be reprimanded afterward for talking for more than five minutes. The content of these briefings is often extremely negative—for example, he periodically reminds everyone that bonuses are related to performance and the boss’s ratings, says that no one would want them even if they left because their work abilities are so poor, and claims that the department director strangely allows other units to attempt to replace our unit, among other things. The situation has caused some employees to suffer nervous-system dysfunction due to immense stress. When they tried to discuss not making the department atmosphere so negative, he said, “If you’re sick, go see a doctor yourself. What does that have to do with me?”

He likes collecting evidence against employees, or luring employees into creating such evidence, and even fabricating it. He then uses it several times during “briefings” to humiliate employees. Before humiliating them, he tells them to keep quiet and not speak. After humiliating them several times, he self-hypnotizes himself into treating nonexistent events as facts and even reports them to the department director, complaining that good employees are difficult to find.

When he wants to smear someone, he does not formally assign them cases. Instead, he tells them to support others and then claims that the person has produced nothing. Someone once advanced seven or eight cases on the same day, but in reality only one was listed under her name. He deliberately said during a briefing that “someone” did not seem to know what they were busy with all day and that, despite having only one case, they still reported overtime. During briefings, he is afraid of being recorded, so he does not name anyone directly. However, he deliberately mentions certain minor details to make everyone infer whom he wants to humiliate, while specifically claiming that he is not referring to anyone in particular.

After driving so many employees to resign, he continues his smear briefings, often saying how terrible the employees who resigned were. He continues mentioning employees who left years ago and occasionally reminds everyone how he will respond when people change jobs in the future and prospective employers call to inquire about them.

The managers often come over to employees and tell them to open an email. Employees must type exactly what the manager dictates, word for word, and then send it under the employee’s name. If the email causes trouble, he tells outsiders that the employee replied on their own and that, by the time he saw it, the email had already been sent and it was too late. He also strongly dislikes employees having harmonious working relationships with his department and will deliberately sow discord among employees within the department.

Human Resources discovered two years ago that there were problems in this department, but no corresponding measures have yet been taken. As a result, people have continued taking leave or resigning over the past year and a half, causing the workload of those who remain to become increasingly heavy...