Workplace reviews and discussion: 康廷工程顧問企業有限公司

Suitable for people who want to experience the harsh realities of the workplace.

Compensation: I asked about the average monthly salary for new hires, which is around NT$23,000–26,000. In Pingtung, that is enough to support yourself, but only enough to support yourself.

Job duties: To put it nicely, you are an engineer; in reality, you are a jack-of-all-trades. You handle everything, including driving to pick up or deliver things and transport people, handling the company’s recyclable waste, conducting environmental inspections (depending on the project), organizing outreach events, making phone calls, writing reports, and so on.

When you first join, they will tell you which project you belong to, but in practice, there is no such thing as “division of labor by project.” Suppose you are assigned to Project XX. Do you think you only need to handle the work for Project XX?

No, you’re thinking too much.

Whenever the supervisors of other projects are overwhelmed, they will ask you to help out. This is also what I hate most, and it leads into the work atmosphere I’m about to describe.

The supervisors at this company protect one another while putting pressure on those at the bottom. There are four supervisors and four new hires in the office, so there are almost as many supervisors as new hires. Why?

First: Incompetent supervisors

Except for the deputy manager and perhaps one other person, every supervisor here is only good at making phone calls. To put it bluntly, they often cannot even do the work they assign to you themselves.

Anyone who has studied management knows that lower-level supervisors must be more capable than their subordinates when it comes to the work; otherwise, how are they supposed to lead them? But this company is different. The lower-level supervisors can simply order you around based on nothing more than their words.

I have seen many new hires ask the supervisors how to handle the tasks assigned to them, only to receive extremely vague answers such as, “It’s all in the project proposal,” or “It’s all in the regulations.” There are two kinds of people who give answers like that: first, those who think your question is so basic that they cannot be bothered to answer; second, those who completely do not know the answer but pretend otherwise. The supervisors here are mostly the latter.

Next time someone asks me something, should I just reply, “It’s all online”? Would that satisfy you?

Second: Unethical supervisors

Why do I say this? This company has a high turnover rate among new hires. Of course, it could also be due to the work-allocation problems mentioned in the first point, but the “main” reason most people leave is this.

What does “unethical” mean? No EQ and no character. Supervisors have power that is treated as greater than anything else in the office, and they protect one another. The company has even established an internal rule called “Do not be rude to supervisors”! So what is the definition of “rude”? That’s right: it is entirely up to the supervisor to decide! My God, is this an authoritarian regime? We live in a democracy, yet even our words and conduct are restricted so that we cannot make someone unhappy. This rule practically shows contempt for the laws of the Republic of China, doesn’t it?

And then there is the supervisors’ emotional behavior. Their attitude in phone calls is basically, “They simply do not regard employees as human beings.” They give you only one sentence of instructions, but the result must meet whatever the supervisor expects in their mind. Otherwise? Get ready to be scolded! I think using this kind of information asymmetry to create opportunities to berate people is truly despicable. You might say, “What if you asked questions during the process? Then there shouldn’t be a problem, right?” Didn’t I already say? When you ask, they just throw back, “It’s in the project proposal.” Ask too many questions and you will still get scolded. Why? Because, in fact, the supervisor really does not know the answer to what you are asking!

This is exactly what happens when an incompetent and unethical person becomes a supervisor: subordinates are bound to suffer. Upper management gives incorrect orders that wreck an entire group of people below, yet those below have nowhere to seek justice because the whole company protects its own. Alas.