Labor and health insurance contributions are not underreported, but the salary is mediocre.

Compared with the animation industry, it's about average; compared with the IT industry as a whole, it depends on how much you love animation.

It's decent for newcomers to build up their skills, and after a year or two you can probably move on.

As long as they aren't colleagues in management positions, most coworkers are easy to get along with.

All overtime is “voluntary,” and the missed-meal allowance is only 100, with the additional requirement that you work past 8 p.m. to claim it.

(For example, if your workday ends, you want to keep working, but you finish before 8 p.m., you can't take the boxed meal home ^_<)

Think twice before joining as an alternative-service research and development substitute; one R&D department is made up almost entirely of such employees, and leaving at around 9 p.m. every night is practically the norm.

Overall, quite a few people “voluntarily” work overtime. If you want to leave somewhat on time, the only exception is probably the team developing iClone.

The company's big promise is an IPO, but, Ray-Fan, many people below the top still don't have any stock. It seems the big shots are chasing their dreams while the people underneath sell their lives to follow along.

Also, the head of R&D at this company has serious problems. I'll refer to him as “the abbot” below.

In other departments, the impression is that department heads will stand up for and shield their own teams.

But when something happens in R&D, even if the responsibility doesn't lie with R&D, the abbot still requires the R&D staff to apologize first (showing OO) to demonstrate sincerity.

The abbot's understanding of technology is also one of a kind. When the people underneath were reviewing whether waterfall development had problems and whether they should try agile development or other approaches to make changes, the abbot actually said: “Agile development is for small apps. Large APPLICATIONS like ours aren't suitable for it.” Looking at the news from a few days ago, where Microsoft said VS would switch entirely to agile development, I was completely floored.

The years of experience among the R&D engineers are quite M-shaped: those who manage to endure long enough may be able to stay, but otherwise people usually hit a bottleneck where they stop learning anything after about two years. The company's technical managers are quite unfamiliar with design patterns; some have even wondered why everything inside an interface is pure virtual.

Some veteran R&D employees are usually very good at hiding their tricks and playing Tai Chi. Most of the time, they wield this technique skillfully, but when certain modules come up, they hide their moves and handle them themselves. Later, I had a chance to look at those modules, and they were really no more complicated than a basic “wild ball” punch; they weren't that difficult to understand.

Also, during product testing, the performance of both R&D and QA is judged by “numbers.” QA faces performance pressure to find duplicate bugs, while R&D faces performance pressure to resolve a certain number of bugs. Although everyone says to resolve the important ones first, at weekly meetings the QA manager loves to publicly call out R&D staff who haven't met their targets, causing everyone to start keeping bugs in reserve. Senior colleagues even tell you to solve a mix of easy and difficult ones—the most important thing is to fill the quota. Because management's logic from above is: if we keep following this number, it will eventually go down to zero~~

Speaking of numbers, one can't omit the abbot's classic line: “Do you have evidence that these numbers came from everyone working overtime?” At that moment, the entire team suddenly no longer knew what they were doing. If you object to his numbers, the abbot's way of calculating them may exceed your imagination. Even if you go to the restroom during the day or go to the convenience store across the street to buy an afternoon snack, he wants you to calculate the time precisely. Strangely, he only calculates time during working hours; he doesn't seem to care nearly as much about time after the scheduled end of the workday.

Newcomers also need to guard against people who aren't managers frequently trying to sneak work onto them. Learn to set boundaries yourself; otherwise, remember: all overtime is voluntary.

For R&D, unless you love animation, there are many other companies willing to offer newcomers better pay and conditions than this place. The political culture in this R&D department is too strange; think carefully before joining.

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I've already been quite polite by not mentioning that products often enter testing before they're finished, or that near the end of testing, senior managers suddenly want to change specifications and add features, and so on. The PM has absolutely no concept of paying down technical debt, and the list goes on. Rather than a technology company, it's more like a traditional manufacturing business.