Workplace reviews and discussion: 宏正自動科技股份有限公司

1. No business travel; the factory is right next door.

2. The company provides cafeteria-style lunch.

1. During the interview, they said overtime pay was provided, but after joining I discovered that was a lie. The company simply does not pay overtime. More accurately, the company uses performance evaluations as a threat so that everyone is afraid to report overtime, creating a culture in which employees appear to work overtime voluntarily. They even have the audacity to claim that the company complies with the Labor Standards Act by paying overtime, and that employees simply choose not to report it. Then everyone is pressured to work overtime every day; the extra hours are essentially donated to the company. Even when there is a legitimate reason to report overtime, it can only be exchanged for compensatory leave, not money. Even if you insist on receiving payment, the overtime pay will merely be deducted from your performance bonus, meaning your annual salary remains unchanged.

2. The company has an absurd number of document procedures and trivial administrative tasks—more than the actual projects. A great deal of time and energy is wasted handling meaningless paperwork and processes.

3. Cost-cutting is the most important factor in project development. They cut costs so aggressively that it is impossible to make anything good. Components must be shared across many product models because the owner's wife is head of purchasing, so purchasing has the final say in many matters. Professionals are forced to follow the lead of a group of nonprofessionals, and this has also produced several extremely arrogant, self-important veteran buyers.

4. The company is genuinely very profitable, with product gross margins of around 59% to 60%, but it is unwilling to invest in its own employees or purchase new equipment. As a result, the equipment is seriously inadequate, and much of it is very old—some of it more than 20 years old. The R&D and testing teams spend their days fighting over equipment and waste a great deal of time.

5. Many of the company's policies are astonishingly unreasonable, and its perspective is extremely short-sighted. It is a company with a persecution complex, constantly guarding against the possibility that its own employees might steal company data. There is no trust whatsoever between employees and the company. Even information that is not particularly confidential cannot be discussed with vendors. Personal USB drives, portable hard drives, tablets, and laptops are not allowed inside the company. The company also insists on using free software rather than paying small amounts for proper tools, making it difficult to get anything done.

6. There is a very strange phenomenon: the higher-paid departments seem to have it easier and also leave work earlier. Examples include IC, the Innovation Research team, and Application Platform Development. The IC team is even consistently the first to line up for lunch every day; sometimes they can be seen lining up at the cafeteria as early as 11:50. The department manager also leaves promptly at 5:30 every day.

7. The company was plagued by intense internal power struggles a few years ago, and a large number of people left. Several years ago, the current vice president of R&D cut the heads of many departments and then installed his own people, so many department managers were parachuted in and have little sense of shared history or solidarity with the employees.

8. Many other unfair factors have caused the company's R&D turnover rate to be high. Most of those who could not accept it have already left. The employees remaining are generally either very senior or very inexperienced. The senior employees are those who endured the previous period of internal conflict, while many other R&D staff are simply biding their time and waiting to change jobs. However, people are not leaving in one major wave; they are leaving gradually, one by one.