Workplace reviews and discussion: 威進國際資訊股份有限公司

In principle, middle-level managers provide a flexible working environment and do not assign you work items every day.

1. The work atmosphere is poor. Although colleagues are quite friendly with one another, the boss only wants to make money, so they desperately take on projects without considering the workload of lower-level employees. Projects are accepted first, and then they find ways to make the engineers work overtime to finish them. As a result, the office is filled only with the sound of keyboards and sighs, and colleagues have no time to interact at all.

2. Leaving work on time easily makes the boss think that you are not proactive or hardworking. In reality, no engineer has ever left work on time. Even if you voluntarily work one extra hour, while the other colleagues work at least two hours of overtime, you will be singled out. So during the peak periods for many projects in the latter half of the year, forget about having dinner on time. To make matters worse, there is no overtime pay, and the company abuses the managerial-exemption system.

3. The company makes employees sign all kinds of unreasonable contracts, such as binding them for three years without providing a signing bonus or setting various penalty clauses. Such contracts surely have not been filed with the local labor bureau. You only find out after being hired and reporting for work that the job does not pay particularly well and that you also have to bear all kinds of rules.

4. Engineers are responsible for developing various systems and reports. Oracle is still a useful skill to practice, but the Grails language is really unpopular in Taiwan, so this job does not add much value when looking for your next position.

5. There is even less to say about project assistants and administrative assistants: they do all kinds of odd jobs, such as ordering boxed lunches and drinks or writing user manuals. They may also have to help create prototypes and write HTML. The advantage is that leaving work on time will not attract the boss's attention.

6. PMs have a somewhat peculiar role. It is normal for them to go around bidding on projects, because they are responsible for dealing with clients and winning contracts, so the boss often asks them to have a heart-to-heart talk. Even when they know the engineers are already close to collapse, they still have to win the project because the boss demands it. They are often caught in the middle and find it difficult to please anyone, and working overtime until 10 p.m. or even into the middle of the night is also common.

7. The boss only wants two kinds of employees: gods and slaves. If you are highly capable and can shoulder system projects worth tens of millions in a year, the boss still will not give you even one-tenth of that as your annual salary. As for slaves, there is even less to say: if your output is merely average, you have to rely on hard work to win the boss's favor. Overall, the treatment of colleagues is mediocre or even below average compared with their output.

8. Employee turnover is not low. In a company of around 50 people, 10-plus people may leave within half a year, which is absurd. Although I know the company is expanding, the number of people in the group keeps fluctuating and returning to its original level. Why? It must be because the employees are expensive, produce little, have bad attitudes, are uncooperative, and lack ambition (I suppose).