Workplace reviews and discussion: 東森購物_電視購物_東森得易購股份有限公司

The company provides a limited supply of free snacks, beverages, and coffee

One health checkup per year

Subsidies for external training courses

Starting salary better than that of system integrators

The following is lengthy…

1. It is called a research and development center, but there is no actual R&D. In reality, it is a contracting company dedicated to taking on projects for the Eastern Media Group.

2. The team recruited at high salaries in 2016 has mostly left, and the company’s focus is not on the software department either.

3. Software companies outside offer much better compensation than Eastern Media. Eastern Media’s advantages are stability and steady, long-term employment; don’t expect to get rich through software here.

4. Get onto the right team and follow the right people. The Infra, payment, and DBA departments—where technical skills have barely grown for decades—are the preferred choices. Avoid F2E and QE, which are easily berated by product marketing. BackEnd, ProjectTeam, and App are mediocre, and suitable for career changers and beginners to build experience.

5. The development process uses a two-week sprint cycle. Release day operates under a responsibility-based system, and PO, F2E, and QE usually have to work overtime.

6. QE is purely manual testing. You don’t need to understand software; your manager will shield you from exposure to professional knowledge.

7. Testing covers IE 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12; Chrome; Android 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10; and iOS 10, 11, and 12. The CTO places great importance on users comprising 0.x%—tens of people—so the fact that multi-platform testing multiplies QE’s workload many times over is not a key consideration.

8. The backend uses .NET MVC5 and the Windows ecosystem.

9. iOS uses Objective-C, while Android is written in Kotlin. The App manager is quite good, so AppTeam is relatively stable, and some colleagues have even returned to the company.

10. The software development environment was established around 2016, and there is currently no team responsible for this area. As a result, there is little code review, few requirements for pull requests, and hotfixes are commonplace.

11. F2E uses React and Vue, taking responsibility for multi-platform development including desktop, mobile, and WebView. It is the worst development team, without a doubt. The WebViews for the Eastern Shopping Network, Sen Sen Shopping Network, and Eastern Shopping App all fall within their scope of work.

12. The F2E manager is the former Scrum Master and PM. The team is managed well, but technology is somewhat beyond him. Don’t expect new hires to develop strong frontend and architecture skills here.

13. The PO team has considerable power and can communicate directly with the CTO. After the organizational reform, all testing work was also handed over to QE, so they are doing fairly well. The only downside is that when there is a production issue, they get berated along with QE. But it does not matter much; in the end, the main focus is still on reviewing QE’s testing problems.

14. I almost forgot the Platform Team. This team’s predecessors were the R&D center’s DevOops and SDET teams, but they were later assigned new tasks, so they exist in name only. It is also rather strange that Eastern Media’s CTO comes from a QA background but does not value the development environment, DevOops, or automation testing.

15. The Maintain Team’s work is somewhat like DevOops or SRE, but not quite. Its main job is to monitor production and prevent major problems. Occasionally, it helps its own teams build some automation tools, but it does not provide automation services for other departments in the company.

Summary:

Once you come here, don’t think too much about it. Just work with the mindset that this is a place to coast and wait for retirement, and don’t have any expectations of the company.

Wang Ling-lin runs the company in a traditional way. Direct selling (Eastern Times Tiens), cosmetics (Natural Beauty), and similar businesses still make up the bulk of the company. The departments that make money are the business departments; the software department merely handles projects for them.

The only advantage is probably that there are not many exceptional experts at the company—if you come here, you can do it too.