Workplace reviews and discussion: 明陽科技有限公司

Leaving work on time. The boss says this means working one extra hour every day, with no overtime on Fridays. There is supposedly a bonus each month, but since I never received an actual payslip, I don't know whether the bonus was paid or how it was calculated. The boss also occasionally treats everyone to cold drinks, and on Fridays treats everyone to lunch. In the afternoon, there is some time when we can use the company's karaoke machine to sing, but we still have to work, so personally I don't think this provides much meaningful relaxation.

At first, I applied for a position as a 3D printing management trainee. In reality, I worked for five days, from May 22 to May 26. Then, when I returned to work after the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, the boss's wife told me, “The boss has decided to let you take a break,” and then I was fired.

I want to tell everyone what I saw and experienced during those five days of work, as well as during the interview.

《Interview》

The work environment is basically the first floor of the boss's home. Besides me, there were three female colleagues and the boss's wife, and there were no partitions between the desks. The interview was conducted in the same environment, meaning that the entire interview with the boss was not private. The most absurd question I remember was how much pocket money I received each month when I was in college, and how much my family's monthly pension was. He then gave me two intelligence tests and a blank sheet of paper and asked me to write a career plan. After I started working, I also saw the boss interview other people. If he did not like someone, he would not even give them the intelligence tests. He invariably asked about their expected salary, and even if they kept answering, “According to company policy,” he would still pressure them to name a figure.

《Work》

The company has established many sales channels through which customers can purchase its products, including toner, ink, karaoke machine rentals, songbooks, 3D printers, and 3D printer consumables. The phone system has 16 lines, and they have a different sales-channel phone number for almost every line. I originally applied for a 3D printing management trainee position, but I understood that in a small company you have to do everything. From what I observed, the tasks I most often did each day were cold-calling potential customers about 3D printers, checking whether different sales channels had orders to ship, packing goods, and taking orders by phone. As far as I know, the company also does online marketing and other things, but it all felt very mysterious. There may have been engineers I did not see. Maybe there had been some news about them before. Portal: https://disp.cc/b/163-888z

My colleagues were actually nice and patiently taught me how to use 3D printers, so I learned quite a lot in that area. However, as a distributor, I felt that the company gave me almost no information about its upstream suppliers. To be honest, to this day I have not been able to verify or find authoritative information showing whether these printers are made in Taiwan, although the company's consistent public claim is that it guarantees they are Taiwan-made. Also, because goods had to be shipped every day, you had to know how to drive a car or ride a scooter. Although I have a car license, I have neither a car nor a scooter, so basically I could not drive or ride. The boss kept hoping that I would help deliver packages, so he told me almost every day to get a scooter license and buy a used vehicle, saying that he would give me a raise. Oh, and he paid me NT$23,000 a month, saying this was the probationary period and that my salary would definitely increase later.

The boss is a middle-aged man. His 27-year-old daughter studied in the same department as I did, and at first he said that this was why he felt particularly friendly toward me, which moved me quite a bit at the time. However, after I gave him my TOEIC score of 630, I began having to take on her personal errands, such as translating things into English so that she could communicate with her Indonesian domestic helper on LINE. Sigh—she is Indonesian; I really wanted to tell him that English is not the native language of every foreigner in the world. One time, at around 11 a.m., he called my desk phone and gave me a string of messages to translate. (He usually stayed upstairs. I guessed that he monitored how everyone used their computers, because he would remind me to improve my efficiency and type faster.) I did not ask when he needed the translation. Then a colleague happened to have something to teach me, so I set this task aside temporarily. When I came back to it about an hour later, the boss started lecturing me. A colleague also spoke up for me, but presumably because he was in a bad mood, he continued criticizing me for not being proficient enough. He even asked whether I would forget everything after taking the TOEIC. I had scored 630 on the test the previous month, and, to be fair, a score of 630 is not particularly high. To put it bluntly, the English level in the entire office was relatively low. And that was not the end of it. In the afternoon, he came downstairs to tell another colleague to teach me something, then deliberately said loudly in Taiwanese, “Who knows whether he’ll keep working here.” Later, when he wanted me to leave, the boss did not tell me directly; he had the boss's wife tell me. I personally feel that the boss's personal qualities need improvement. I had previously heard that, before I joined, the boss had also just fired another male employee. The reason was supposedly that when a colleague asked him why he was so good at driving, he answered that it was because he often helped transport goods to the traditional market. After hearing this, the boss became angry that the man had a side job and fired him. I am not sure whether that is what actually happened, but I am sharing it for everyone's reference.

Overall, it felt like being in a relationship that had just begun, then having the other person lose interest after spending time together—but being dumped by them first. xD