Workplace reviews and discussion: 工研院 _財團法人工業技術研究院

The salary is pretty good. During the interview, they told me I would be hired to work on image recognition, and they were very nice.

However, after I joined, I was assigned to another department and asked to help with a drone project. Without any warning, I discovered that my name had been added to the project personnel list. Yet during the interview, they never mentioned that I would be asked to assist with flying drones, repairing drones, or related duties. On top of that, I already had a project to work on, along with other miscellaneous tasks that consumed my working hours. Details below.

I already had the system design for a project to build from scratch. On top of that, my supervisor inexplicably asked me to manage the department’s servers. When I asked senior colleagues whether there were any user manuals left by previous staff, I found that there were none. The person who had previously managed the servers had already resigned. While I was figuring things out, a toxic colleague who offered absolutely no help would make sarcastic remarks, asking why young people nowadays had such poor breadth of skills, saying that in their day everyone had to know a little bit of everything and could get this kind of thing up and running immediately. If that is so, why not come down and do it themselves instead of bothering a master’s graduate?

Occasionally, when my supervisor’s computer suddenly could not connect to the institute’s internal network, he would ask me to configure it. When I told him that I had work to do, he would say, “Then I can’t work at all either. As an engineer, aren’t you supposed to solve these problems for me?” The point is that I was not hired to repair my supervisor’s computer. Once in a while would have been fine, but this happened several times and consumed my working hours. Around the second time, I discovered that my supervisor had not installed the monitoring software, which was why the computer could not connect to the institute’s internal network in the first place. I asked him to install the institute’s monitoring software, but he said it was his computer and he did not want to install monitoring software. He told me to connect it to the internet without installing it. So I helped him bypass the institute’s rules and used a router to connect him to the internal network. This took up an entire afternoon, and I could not even record it in my work log. My supervisor would still complain that my work efficiency was poor. I could almost only work on the project I was actually responsible for after work. All eight hours of the workday were spent on miscellaneous chores with no tangible results and assisting a PhD colleague with patent experiments. It was extremely unpleasant.

The higher-ups here also know how to make things sound good: “I’ll take responsibility; you just focus on your work.” Then, whenever something went wrong, they would push all the responsibility onto the engineers. When a client called them, they would simply transfer the extension to me and say that I should handle everything. However, some issues involved coordinating requirements, which should have been handled by the supervisor or PM, yet in the end I was asked to step in and coordinate. If I encountered something that could not be resolved and asked for help, I would first be mocked: “Why are young people so bad at communication?” The point is that I did not have sufficient authority; many things were not mine to decide. I wonder whether they ever think things through before they speak.

There were many other idiotic decisions as well—too many to list. In any case, unless you have a PhD, I strongly recommend that you do not come here. You will be treated and ordered around like a dog; they do not regard you as a human being at all.

I joined this place as a full-time employee immediately after completing my master’s degree because the supervisor here invited me to interview and then hired me. However, I left after working there for eight months. The work environment here is extremely poor. Do not continue believing that the Industrial Technology Research Institute is a place where you can coast until retirement or have an easy time. If you do not have a PhD, you will merely be treated as a slave here. That is all.