Workplace reviews and discussion: 威技電器股份有限公司

1. The Tainan plant has a new environment and new equipment

2. Reporting overtime is not made difficult; overtime pay is provided in accordance with the Labor Standards Act

3. Colleagues in the technical department have harmonious relationships

1. The supervisor's credibility is low

　　During the interview, I had already stated that I could not accept frequent overtime. After reporting for work, I found that colleagues routinely worked overtime and that the workload could barely be completed without overtime. If you do not work overtime, the boss's wife will keep asking to talk with you and question your attitude toward work.

　　The supervisor said there was a task and repeatedly required me to travel to Taipei for business. Only after arriving did I find out that the work had not yet been finalized. In reality, the Taipei department was short-staffed and I was called up to share miscellaneous tasks. In the past, other colleagues had stayed there for several years, and someone from Taichung had stayed in Tainan for more than a year.

　　New employees are required to intern on the production line during their first month to learn about product components and assembly procedures and to write a daily work journal. In reality, you are treated entirely as a technician for a month and are required to continue writing daily work journals for more than three months.

　　During the interview, they said that after completing three months of work, employees could have lunch in the employee cafeteria. After the three-month period ended, there was no further information at all. When I asked about it myself, I was told that there was no space and that I could not go—an obviously dismissive excuse.

2. Poor attitude toward employee benefits

　　I was sent to Taipei for three weeks without any business-trip allowance, receiving only a little over NT$3,000 in transportation subsidies. The accommodation was a rundown apartment on a high floor. There was only one single bed in the room, and everything else had to be arranged independently. The layout was strange, and roommates had to pass through the room to access the balcony, leaving no privacy. No transportation was provided, so every day I had to ask colleagues for rides to and from work or take a bus and walk. However, company executives frequently traveled between Taipei and Tainan by high-speed rail on the same day and used taxis for transfers.

　　A family member of the company owners serves as the plant affairs manager and frequently watches surveillance footage to monitor employees' every move. If an employee is not resting during the production line's break time, the manager takes a screenshot and reports it, even though the supervisor has not stipulated that the technical department's break times must coincide with those of the production line. The manager takes breaks at will and does not smoke in the designated smoking area.

　　After I reported that the mouse was malfunctioning, I was only told that they would ask the cooperating vendor whether a replacement was available, and then there was no follow-up. It took nearly a month, and only after I reported it again did a senior colleague in the same department in Taipei help resolve the issue.

　　The company is located in a remote area. When working overtime at night, you can only go hungry or eat snacks to stave off hunger. Going out also means worrying about being criticized for exceeding the break time.

　　The employee trip was arranged as three days and two nights at an expensive hotel, with two activities paid for separately. Employees who had worked for less than one year had to pay two-thirds of the cost themselves. Even if you had told colleagues long in advance that you would not go and had to report to work, if you were told without warning three days before the departure date that the trip was canceled, you still had to use annual leave or take unpaid leave.

　　Using the coffee machine in the pantry as a regular employee would result in criticism. Breakfast could only be eaten in the cafeteria and had to be finished before work hours began.

3. Poor division of labor and collaboration between departments

　　After the sales department takes on a project, it asks the technical department to provide a schedule, then repeatedly demands that the timeline be shortened and that employees work overtime to speed up production, while assuming that every procedure can be completed perfectly on the first attempt. This results in the strange situation where most colleagues' projects are delayed. On the one hand, they require procedures to be followed; on the other hand, they demand that procedures be skipped and simplified. When problems arise, they come back and criticize you.

　　Project requirements are frequently changed. You often work overtime to meet the schedule, only for the direction to change two days later, forcing you to restart almost from scratch, after which you are constantly urged to work faster.

　　After the design is completed, the sample model must be tested at a plant in mainland China. The test reports are extremely sparse and provide no indication of the reason; you only know that the design was rejected. Supervisors disagree with one another, leaving employees caught in the middle and placed in a difficult position.

　　The work items are complicated, and from time to time you also have to handle production-line issues. When customers request data or pictures, the sales department often does not clarify the details and directly orders the technical department around, treating it like an errand boy.

4. Incomplete historical data and work software

　　The company uses an obscure, non-mainstream drafting software that frequently crashes and is very inconvenient. When communicating with the vendor, file-conversion problems also consume time and require the drawings to be modified again.

　　The data is disorganized. A single product may have several versions, and it is unclear which file was last modified and is the current production file. You may discover halfway through editing a drawing that you picked up the wrong file.

There is much more, but I will not list everything.