Workplace reviews and discussion: 和泰聯網股份有限公司

1. The logic of the marketing and sales staff is stronger than that of the old-timers leading the engineering team.

2. Suitable for people without a relevant academic background or recent graduates to come and write code. The old-timers specify using HTML + CSS + jQuery: “If you can develop with jQuery, why use React?” There is no pressure to learn.

3. There are no performance evaluations. A bug that could be fixed in an hour can be fixed slowly over four days. The old-timers do not understand it either, so you can come and practice your debating skills.

4. Clocking in and out is required; overtime can be exchanged for compensatory leave.

5. Frontline employees and managers outside the engineering team are all easy to get along with.

6. The office will be moved to a new location eventually, but the move has already been postponed once, and the timing is currently unknown.

7. On the way to work at the Xinzhuang campus, you can admire cars for free and get acquainted with the deputy station chief next door (a Corgi).

1. Senior managers lack the ability to distinguish technical issues, often making technical decisions and compressing schedules.

2. Schedules are determined by big data in their heads: connecting three payment services with the head office’s internal accounting system, with no PM and possibly only one Backend engineer available for support in the future, all within a one-month deadline—and a pile of other projects will also be due during that period.

3. For PMs trusted by management, engineers are given only a static image drawn by one Designer, with not a single word describing the requirements, and are told to start development. Because the requirements are unclear, they are changed constantly and the project is delayed, yet management still thinks it is doing a great job. For PMs who are not trusted, even after preparing requirements with Axure, they are still criticized for planning too slowly.

4. The record is working seven days a week, with overtime every day. Afterwards, colleagues were not even allowed to report seven consecutive days of overtime within one week. A colleague got into a car accident due to exhaustion, was found to have a liver tumor after examination, and underwent chemotherapy.

5. The development process is neither Scrum nor Waterfall; it is DDD (Deadline-Driven Development). People are asked to work overtime only when everything is about to explode. Deadlines are imposed without analysis, there is no project risk management whatsoever, and action is taken only when the deadline is almost here.

6. When senior management feels development is not progressing as quickly as they imagined, they outsource the work to external vendors. Therefore, be prepared to take over a pile of terrible code. If the outsourced vendor cannot be pushed to act, you will be asked to work overtime. If performance is not good enough, you are also expected to fix it—but usually it is already too late.

7. Senior management believes that if a project is successfully delivered, there is no question of who was right or wrong. However, you will be the one working overtime to clean up other people’s messes; if it fails, it is because development was too slow.

8. They are skilled at dealing with people who raise problems. Even providing a solution along with the problem is not acceptable. Obey and do exactly as instructed; speak less and do more.

9. When things are not done well, they say they are a startup. Startups everywhere inexplicably bear the consequences of their karma.