1. Good school environment, with discounts and benefits for faculty and staff
2. The unit is well-funded, and basic equipment and supplies are provided
3. The system architecture is large in scale, so there is a lot to learn, with guidance from experienced senior colleagues
I. Job Responsibilities
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1. The division of responsibilities is unclear. Developers are expected to make or participate in decisions—in other words, developers are asked to endorse decisions made by the leadership, so that if responsibility is pursued later, there is someone to shift the blame onto.
2. There is no specification document to provide backing, but meetings are recorded. When supervisors or senior management require architectural changes, they must be made, without considering the future impact or whether the current situation is suitable for implementation. This increases project difficulty and delays progress, while developers are left to bear responsibility for failing to meet the schedule.
3. Laws and rules are chaotic. The system and programs are constrained by educational staff procedures and regulations. Overall, the SOP is more like adding whatever comes to mind and filling in whatever is missing, making it difficult for users to understand how to operate the system and making development challenging. Agile development has not been adopted.
II. Culture and Atmosphere
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1. Because this is a project office under the K-12 Education Administration, there are many considerations and pressures from senior management. Since information is conveyed through a single point of contact, neither side understands the other's position or the current situation, and cooperation does not seem to be built on a foundation of trust. The same is true within the team.
2. The team's decision-making and leadership style are characterized by high-pressure coercion. In short, the organization leans toward authoritarian rule: rule by individuals takes precedence over rule of law, the team's established rules are applied inconsistently, and treating people differently based on who they are rather than what they do is commonplace.
3. The team is not large, but office politics are serious, with clear divisions and everyone acting independently. It is highly questionable whether this is really the same unit.
4. Violations of the Labor Standards Act. In my opinion, the Labor Standards Act protects employees' minimum basic rights; it should not be treated as a hiring threshold. Many companies offer benefits and conditions better than those required by the Labor Standards Act, but overtime has become routine in this unit due to understaffing and a heavy workload. Employees frequently have to handle and respond to work-related matters after hours, and most people have been in this unhealthy state for a long time. Supervisors and senior management also tolerate this situation, believing that dedication requires this level of effort, while overtime pay or compensatory leave varies from person to person or is decided on a case-by-case basis.
Conclusion
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The above is purely a statement of my personal position and impressions. This unit does not allocate sufficient human resources and lacks adequate information about the current education system and processes. Communication between the Administration and the unit is also not transparent. Under these circumstances, digitizing a large-scale national project is extremely difficult. From a practical engineering perspective, this is by no means an easy task. Behavioral economics tells us that people tend to be overly optimistic and overestimate their own ideas. I hope the unit will execute this project with the utmost caution and not let down the expectations of taxpayers and the country.