Seeing TJIC bicker and squabble all day is like watching elementary school students argue.

TJIC’s turnover rate is exceptionally high. There are too many people in Taiwan who currently have N1 certification, so TJIC is not worried about being unable to fill positions. TJIC uses a temp staffing system, and most newcomers are dispatched workers. If they are unable to adapt and leave, the staffing agency will help find a replacement. I have seen people resign after working for just one week, and I have also seen people resign after just two weeks. The constant turnover makes things extremely unstable, and there is no real system for training newcomers. They say you need Japanese-language N1 certification to get in, yet there are people who cannot even speak Japanese but claim to have N4, understand 60%, and still get hired, only to push work around inside the company.

The former department head led internal power struggles and openly bullied a team leader who had been recruited from the Industrial Technology Research Institute. When that team leader was no longer useful to him, he publicly bullied them at TJIC, demoted them to an ordinary staff member, and, as if that were not enough, transferred them to Kaohsiung. The team leader was nearly 50 at the time and had a girlfriend in her twenties. This forced the team leader to resign. Because the dismissal also required a written report, the former department head used every means possible to drive the team leader out—truly a master of internal power struggles.

The bickering and squabbling inside TJIC are nothing new. A newly promoted team leader clashed with a veteran team leader and they argued openly inside TJIC, to the point that the former department head and deputy department head had to close the door and decide who was in the right. They also drove an older employee out.

Things can be very difficult for dispatched workers. Veteran permanent employees bully new dispatched workers and dump work on them, making them work overtime until they are exhausted, so the casualty rate among dispatched workers is very high. One female colleague did not leave work until 4 a.m., and many people did not leave until after midnight. The worst part is that overtime is unpaid. You just have to work while starving, working for TJIC for free until you are completely worn out, because work is randomly dumped on whoever is available, and the veterans especially like dumping work on dispatched newcomers.

People often cannot leave until very late because too many well-connected people enter the organization without doing any work, leaving these dispatched workers to handle it. As a result, work is distributed unevenly, and newcomers often receive an excessive workload, leading to an extremely high attrition rate among them. The former department head would paint an overly rosy fantasy, saying there were good opportunities to change jobs because many Japanese companies interacted with TJIC and would come to recruit from it. The problem is that Japanese companies want people who are inexpensive and useful, and they recruit directly through staffing agencies. If you aspire to work for a Japanese company, you can simply interview with one directly; there is no need to go to TJIC to work as a dispatched laborer for an illegal organization—the Institute for Information Industry—that does not pay overtime.