Workplace reviews and discussion: 睿智通機器人股份有限公司

1. A small startup company with a relatively flat organization, offering more opportunities to interact with senior management.

2. Same as above: the company is small, but it has engineers in various fields, making it easier to learn about different areas.

3. The junior employees are nice and easy to get along with.

4. A foreign company; when I first joined, the company atmosphere was fairly relaxed (until it gradually got worse later on).

5. Same as point 4: it really is a foreign company with foreigners, so if you are in a science- or engineering-oriented position, you may have opportunities to practice a second foreign language more.

1. The flip side of the same thing is that it becomes a disadvantage. The organization is flat, so there are many opportunities to interact with senior management, but you also get to see how incompetent they are; in most cases, their skill at talking exceeds their actual substance.

2. It is a startup, and its product is a robot, so the product’s future is worrying. To be honest, Taiwan’s robotics industry is not yet mature, yet the company wants to enter the Japanese market. What they said on the television program (the TX segment) sounded good, but most of it was just bluffing. The company’s robots have no so-called “intelligence” or “self-thinking” capability, and there is no machine learning; at most, they can build a map, like a robot vacuum. The hardware has no core technology either—everything is pieced together from different fields. The company does have a technical consultant and an engineering lead with robotics backgrounds, but they also lack experience with “humanoid” robots. The product has remained in the debugging stage, and although mass production has genuinely begun, there are still many problems with testing the assembled units. The robot can perform very few functions. On the TX program, they said that placing the basket on the floor was to avoid human-to-human contact, but in reality it was because the robot could only place the basket on the floor; these are standard movements hard-coded into it (not to mention that the basket sometimes falls down).

3. Senior management likes flattering comments and is the kind that pulls a sour face as soon as it hears criticism or suggestions. There is also a very serious problem with racial discrimination. Discrimination by Taiwanese against Taiwanese is genuinely severe. The senior management throughout the company is like this: strange policies are applied only to Taiwanese employees, while foreigners can work from home, and even disappear for an entire morning without anyone daring to say anything. Taiwanese employees work hard, but senior management does not even offer a word of praise. I even heard that Taiwanese engineers who had been with the company for a long time and had previously received stock allocations were given three or four fewer shares than foreign engineers who joined later. Senior management also only takes the initiative to speak with foreigners, even though their own English is honestly poor (extremely Taiwanese-style English, with a very limited vocabulary), so communication barriers sometimes arise. Yet they insist on speaking English with Taiwanese employees, adding a few English words here and there while often using verbs and nouns incorrectly—I have no idea what they are trying to express. Most of the foreigners at the company have good attitudes; only a few speak to you with the attitude of white racial superiority. Otherwise, everyone is generally easy to get along with.

4. The company is very bad at judging people. There are many incompetent people inside the company, but because they occupy senior positions, they effectively get promoted into those roles simply by accumulating work experience. It calls itself a foreign company, but among the people in senior management, it is really half and half: half are actually foreigners, while the other half are very traditional middle-aged or older men. If you point out their mistakes to their faces and hope to improve the company’s systems, you can imagine what will happen to you. Incompetence among lower-level employees is also left unchecked because performance reviews consist merely of having employees fill out their own forms and are completely opaque. Usually, even incompetent junior employees can coast for at least a year before being reported by other junior employees. The layoffs during the pandemic were even more miserable: many technical leads in middle management were removed, and several engineers at the bottom were also forced out, while assistants were allowed to stay? The company only wants to retain people who obediently follow instructions and do their work; those who speak up and point out mistakes usually do not last long.

5. Hardware employees are not valued; this is a company led by software and PMs. The company is very “male chauvinist,” and verbal bullying is everywhere in the workplace. At one meeting, there was only one young female engineer among the engineers. When a new male colleague joined, the male PM asked him in front of everyone whether he had a girlfriend. The man said he was already married, and the male PM then said in front of everyone, “What a shame for XXX (the female engineer),” as if women were born to get married and have children. The company is controlled by the PMs and foreigners, and the head PM’s management style is very strange. He loves making people write pointless reports (I believe it is because those senior managers who love to talk also enjoy reading them). He said that the company would stop using email and use only Slack (a business version of software similar to LINE). When you ask him about A, he digresses into something completely unrelated to A, then talks about how much he knows about the subject. I would often think to myself, “Then why don’t you stop being a PM and do the work of those positions instead? XD”

6. Company morale is low. The software side is still fairly all right, but the hardware side, and even procurement, have little confidence in the company’s products. This is largely because of the company’s racial discrimination: Taiwanese employees think, “No matter how well I do, I will not be praised,” so they do their work half-heartedly. People with passion and ideals eventually have those qualities extinguished after being repeatedly discouraged.

7. A startup with very little structure or management. There is no clocking in or out, HR does not keep any attendance records at all, and there is no system for overtime pay or compensatory time off. The company shows very little regard for its employees, treating their hopes for the company as unreasonable nitpicking. New employees have no guidelines to follow, and the company does not require anyone to retain or share information. As a result, when problems occur, there is often no way to trace them; sometimes engineers do not even inform others about experiments they have completed themselves, so the same tasks are often repeated or left undone.

The disadvantages really far outweigh the advantages, and there are far too many to list. If you want to collect a paycheck while worrying about whether this company will go bankrupt or be sold, and get blindsided every day, then you are welcome to come try this company!