Workplace reviews and discussion: 泰樂科技軟體有限公司

More annual leave than required by the Labor Standards Act, with snacks and coffee provided. They do not skimp on the hardware devices needed for work.

Frontline employees are friendly and willing to share and help one another. Some members of management, however, are very calculating; they do not deserve to have such a friendly group of highly capable employees.

Even though there are foreign colleagues, both the compensation and management style are very much like those of a traditional Taiwanese company.

It is a company run primarily by personal discretion; the systems are just for show. Even when the team exceeds the targets arbitrarily set by management and completes all assigned tasks, if management says your performance is poor, then your performance is poor. They cannot provide any verifiable evidence, the promised profit-sharing turns out to be empty, and their commitments are inconsistent.

Some members of management do not properly fulfill their responsibilities, but they make higher-level managers believe that frontline employees are at fault. They play information-asymmetry games with both sides, pushing responsibility down onto every employee while they only need to make the final decisions.

To ensure that the product could launch on schedule, the development team had engineers draw the process diagrams themselves and write detailed product requirements themselves. Looking back, that was really foolish, because the credit would not go to the engineers. People joining now might not encounter this problem, because several “project assistants” have been hired to do these tasks—and the abilities of these “project assistants” are far better than those of their supervisors.

No matter how trivial the matter, as long as it can serve certain purposes (asserting authority or belittling disliked employees), it can be blown out of proportion. After working there for a while, you can see that one particular PM has extremely poor emotional control; by contrast, their almost obsequious attitude toward senior managers is worlds apart.

Employee turnover is high. For a company of around 60 people, it is normal for about 1–3 employees to leave every two months.