Workplace reviews and discussion: 醬子科技股份有限公司

The boss speaks very pleasantly during interviews, so be careful about that. I initially asked whether the company used web front-end technologies and whether it had web front-end engineers. The boss said the company had front-end engineers and that I could learn after joining. I also asked about the size of the engineering team, and the boss said it was a small company with about 20 people.

It turned out that I was heavily misled. Including me, there were only three engineers; the rest were PMs, PEs (project execution interns), and marketing interns. There was a front-end engineer, but it was an Android front-end engineer who had only been working for six months—there was no web front-end engineer at all. Because the company couldn't find an iOS engineer, the work had already been outsourced for half a year.....

The entire company had only three engineers, while the remaining seven or eight were outsourced engineers whom we didn't meet (three of them were third-year university students who came as summer interns).

Employee turnover was extremely high. Other than the sales employee, who was the boss's close friend from when he was young, the most senior employee was a middle-aged C# backend engineer who had been there for two and a half years. Everyone else had been there for less than six months. If you stayed there for four or five months, you would already be the second-most senior person in the entire company.

Nearly 30 people left the company within six months. The highest record was six people leaving in one month, and most people left after anywhere from three days to three months. The company recruited two iOS engineers at once after searching for more than six months, but both resigned after only two weeks.

There was absolutely no training. Since the company had almost no engineers, new engineers had to figure everything out on their own, like blind men feeling an elephant. There was little room for improvement and no one to learn from. The situation was the same for PMs and designers, which was why people often resigned after only two or three weeks.

The boss is obsessed with cutting costs. Employees even have to provide their own work laptops (with no reimbursement). During the interview, the boss said there would be a half-day Happy Hour every month to watch movies, but after joining, I discovered that Happy Hour was often ignored. On top of that, NT$300 was deducted from our salary every month to subsidize Happy Hour—something I had not been told about at all.

The company had no systems or structure whatsoever. In a typical project company, each PM would lead an engineering team, and the projects assigned to that PM would be developed by that team. PMs usually have some technical background or have transitioned from engineering. Here, however, there were four or five full-time PMs, who hired seven or eight university interns at the cheap rate of NT$21,000 to serve as PEs (project execution staff) and do the full-time PMs' work. Each person handled two or three projects simultaneously. The most alarming part was that none of the PMs or PEs understood technology at all; even nursing-school students were hired as PMs. Since the PMs and PEs were all inexperienced newcomers or interns, they often ended up doing odd jobs, inefficient trivial tasks, and chasing clients with phone calls, resulting in everyone being frantically busy all day and not leaving until 8 p.m.

The company's three or four full-time engineers were shared among all the PMs and PEs, causing the Android and iOS engineers to frequently develop six or seven projects at the same time. The boss would rather spend money hiring many interns at NT$21,000 each to serve as PEs than hire engineers. Even the administrative staff were interns. When there were not enough engineers, work was handed to outsourcing teams or outsourced for NT$25,000 to engineering interns still attending university. The code quality was never reviewed, so after the outsourced work was returned, the company had to maintain it. If there were bugs, the company's full-time engineers were responsible for fixing them, including examining code they had not written themselves.