Workplace reviews and discussion: 財團法人東元科技文教基金會

Convenient transportation, and nothing else.

The chairman and CEO basically do not manage anything, allowing a certain supervisor, T, to run amok here for 20 years.

All the previous negative reviews about this foundation on Tianyan Tong were absolutely true warnings, and things have only gotten worse.

After resigning, a former colleague summed up this job as follows: “...I have encountered annoying bosses, heavy workloads, and tight schedules, but I have never experienced a workplace that makes my emotions feel clouded. During my time at the foundation, simple tasks had to be done in complicated ways, linear thinking had to be approached in a roundabout manner, only to circle back to the starting point. Tasks that could have been completed quickly had to take several times as long to execute; only then was it considered getting work done. All of these phenomena show that the foundation’s problems do not lie in insufficient manpower or an excessive workload, but in the managers’ incompetence.”

The passage above summarizes the current state of this job. The various other absurd things that have happened are also too numerous to list; below are a few examples for everyone’s reference.

1.

There is absolutely no respect for others, especially employees he dislikes. He criticizes everything without restraint, from their work abilities to their personal habits, to the point of personal attacks. He complains that people type too loudly, use the mouse too loudly, walk too noisily, smell bad, breathe too loudly, and so on. He also very much likes to turn off the air conditioning because he feels cold. When other employees say that they feel stuffy (anyone can imagine how stuffy an office building is without air conditioning), he questions whether they have a heart problem; otherwise, why would they feel stuffy? Even when it is not the area where his seat is located, whenever he passes by, he will “casually” turn off other people’s air conditioning.

2.

He often boasts about having done this job here for more than 20 years, yet when organizing events that are held every year, the process is still just as chaotic as it was in the first year. He is often frantic, every task is pushed right up against the deadline, and then vendors are pressured to work overnight. He once proudly told outsiders that the documents for every event were only frantically produced one or two days beforehand, apparently to show that he believes in “slow work for fine results,” but in reality this only makes people feel that the foundation is inefficient.

3.

He loves showing off his superficial knowledge of neuroscience, and some of the sources of the knowledge he has encountered are also controversial. However, because the people providing him with this knowledge are his good friends and major donors, he refuses to accept any corrections. When he encounters people he finds difficult to understand, or people who do not listen to him closely enough, he starts saying that there is something wrong with their brains and that they need to get examined, among other things.

4.

There is no need for any work plan when working here, because whenever you arrange your schedule for the day, supervisor T can always use some trivial matter to disrupt your entire day—and I mean the “entire day.” It is impossible to handle more important and urgent matters during working hours, resulting in everyone having to work overtime.

Supervisor T also does inexplicable things during work hours, such as organizing his desk or cabinets, or going out to wash his hair. As a result, tasks get stuck with him, and he only starts doing real work near the end of the day, delaying employees’ departure time.

5.

He has absolutely no respect for professional expertise. Anyone whose opinion differs from his, even if they are a leading expert in the field, will be privately criticized by him as worthless, with him saying that they do not understand and are unprofessional. He also loves threatening and enticing vendors, and completely ignores industry standards in design—he changes things whenever he wants. This leads to constant complaints from vendors about being exploited, while employees end up caught in the middle and unable to work effectively.

Moreover, if the other party is influential and he cannot win an argument, he incites other Indigenous teachers to join in the uproar, creating opposition between the production team and the performance team, and then acts as a mediator himself. He plays this two-faced game to perfection; it is truly a shame that he did not go into politics.

6.

He is extremely hypocritical, often pretending to care about your situation when in fact he wants to pry into your private life. If you do not tell her, she will go around asking others. He often loudly announces that everyone should leave work on time, but when you are wrapping things up and preparing to leave, he immediately asks about the status of something and whether you can produce it for him right away, or immediately assigns you other work, forcing you to work overtime. Yet he will then say that there was no overtime that day, so he refuses to sign the overtime application. In short, he takes advantage of you.

He loves using LINE for work, insisting that everyone work in the group chat, but privately he often messages people asking them to do things that might make him look unreasonable if he posted them in the group, or complains about other employees, while not daring to confront and correct the employees he dislikes face-to-face.

If supervisor T worked for a for-profit organization, she would probably be fired within two months. The staff turnover is so high that one might mistakenly think the foundation has no full-time employees and that everyone is a volunteer. Yet the issue of high staff turnover has never prompted any reflection on whether management is at fault. Everything is blamed on young people being too pampered and lacking resilience.

If you want to become a model Taiwanese wage slave, this foundation can be said to be the top choice.