RMA Engineer stationed in the United States:

The company provides housing (the advantage is that everyone gets a private room; the disadvantage is that there is only one kitchen, so everyone needs to coordinate when cooking, otherwise people will get in each other’s way).

There is a company vehicle, and fuel expenses are reimbursed based on actual costs (there were two vehicles in the early days, but later one old vehicle was scrapped. The supervisor then kept refusing to purchase a new one, forcing everyone to travel together and come and go as a group. The supervisor also kept encouraging people to buy their own cars, saying they could then go wherever they wanted without having to compete with others for the vehicle; however, it was unclear whether fuel expenses would be reimbursed).

RMA Engineer stationed in the United States:

The job role is unclear.

Although the position is nominally an RMA engineer, in addition to analyzing (including machines with abnormalities found during production-line testing and machines returned due to customer complaints) and repairing the company’s products, you also have to handle shipment testing, prepare spare parts requested by customers, and prepare spare materials.

You are also expected to lead the production lines (four production lines were planned: some for refurbishing and shipping products with large numbers of returns, and others for reworking and shipping products with widespread factory shipping abnormalities or machine problems), train operators, write SOPs, produce and maintain fixtures, and maintain production-line equipment.

The approach to compensation is inequitable.

When negotiating salary with the Taipei office, it was clearly stated that the compensation consisted of the base salary (negotiated individually with the company; to junior colleagues who may read this, I strongly suggest negotiating a higher salary if possible, because you have to know and do everything here) plus an overseas assignment allowance (approximately NT$41,000, adjusted according to fluctuations in the U.S. dollar, though not by much. It is mainly intended to subsidize the cost of living in the United States, with some compensation for being far from home and for benefits not received in Taiwan). However, the female department manager in the United States (a Taiwanese national) treated these two components as one, constantly saying that we earned so much more than people in Taipei and therefore should do more and perform better than others. She then dumped a pile of oppressive tasks on us (although she herself also loved accepting assignments from all over the place).

Performance bonuses and year-end bonuses are distributed unfairly, with no open or transparent evaluation criteria; everything depends on the supervisor’s personal preferences.

An engineer who had been there for three years and another who had been there for two years received only about one to 1.1 months’ salary as their year-end bonus, while a newcomer who had been there for about half a year received more than two months’ salary.

The year-end bonus here is calculated based on base salary and does not include the overseas assignment allowance.

In addition, the company has a separate performance bonus. At the end of each year, employees first conduct self-evaluations, which are then reviewed through multiple levels. The results affect salary increases and performance bonuses in the following year.

It feels unfair because everyone here is actually being pushed extremely hard. Naturally, this eventually causes some pushback, which in turn affects work attitudes and related issues. If that is then used to conclude that someone has not been working, I honestly have to ask: are you serious?

There are major problems with work assignments.

As mentioned above, every day involves dealing with a pile of tasks (in addition to the production lines and operators). Because assignments are constantly changing, the supervisor will continually dump tasks on you, and expects every one of them to be completed within the required timeframe. At best, she will even tell you that some tasks can be taken back to the dormitory to do, because she does not want to approve overtime (overtime here can only be compensated with time off; there is no overtime pay).

Because so much work is dumped on you, when earlier tasks are not completed on time, she starts targeting and questioning you, and expects you to stay behind and work overtime to finish everything. Of course, she will not approve compensatory leave for that either.

There are actually many more issues, too numerous to list.

You can wait for yourselves to come and slowly savor the experience.