Workplace reviews and discussion: 瑞意創科股份有限公司

The following comments are intended to address a former colleague I once worked with and provide a fairer assessment of the comments regarding RayArk Technology. First, I should state that I was also an employee of this company and later decided to leave due to my personal career plans.

First of all, the colleagues at the company are all easy to get along with and provide work-related assistance when help is needed—there is no doubt about that. The company has indeed maintained a long-term partnership with the Institute for Information Industry, but this is not what could be called “going through the back door.” In business collaborations, it is quite normal for successful cooperation in the past to lead to continued collaboration. This is the result of mutual trust between companies, which is not easy to establish. Describing it as “going through the back door” is, in my view, highly inappropriate, and such wording, driven by your personal emotions, may damage the company’s reputation. Please be cautious about what you say.

As for the environment, the owner and his wife have a dog, and for convenience in caring for it, they bring the dog into the workplace. Because the dog is relatively prone to anxiety, it tends to bark when there is movement near the entrance. The owner and his wife have repeatedly invited pet trainers to the company to seek ways to improve the situation. Their purpose was also to prevent the dog from causing inconvenience to colleagues; they did not simply ignore the situation. During my employment, I also served as an interviewer. Whenever candidates came for interviews, I would ask whether they were uncomfortable around dogs and inform them of some of the dog’s behaviors, allowing anyone interested in working at the company to evaluate the situation beforehand.

In addition, the owner’s wife has a habit of smoking, and I also smoke. During the more than three years I worked at the company, I never noticed cigarette smoke drifting indoors, nor did I feel that it affected the work. Some of the clients we interacted with also smoked and would smoke at the entrance. I feel that bringing this up is making too much of a fuss over a minor issue, and if it really caused discomfort, I believe it could have been raised.

Regarding project management, the company indeed does not have a dedicated PM responsible for communication and coordination. However, because the company is small, whenever difficulties arose during project production, they could be brought up directly with the owner for discussion. I also encountered difficulties in project execution and raised them with the owner. Depending on the circumstances, he would either allow more time for further attempts or directly reduce the expected scope.

For planning, the owner would usually first take on the planning role himself, develop ideas for the project, and ask the internal technical staff whether the necessary technology could be implemented. He would also hold meetings with everyone internally to discuss whether there were better ideas for the project plan. If an idea was good, he would adopt it directly. He would not make decisions rashly; only when everyone agreed on a direction would it be adopted and put into operation.

As for UI, the owner is also professionally trained in graphic design, while the company’s artists mainly specialize in 3D, so this type of work was generally handled by the owner himself. However, because the company also had other business to manage, there were sometimes time constraints, though not every time.

During my employment, there were many AR projects that I worked on together with other 3D artists, a senior programmer, and the owner, and we were able to complete the projects successfully within the deadlines.

Finally, regarding project scheduling, some projects at the company did indeed have tight schedules, but most of these were AR projects, whose content generally did not involve a particularly large amount of work. Several large VR projects, on the other hand, took as long as six months or even nearly a year to produce.

For programming, the company mainly used Unreal as its primary development engine. However, because Unreal talent is difficult to find in Taiwan, the company later adopted a strategy of using Unreal for VR and Unity for AR, with the aim of reducing the workload of the company’s Unreal engineers. However, the long-term difficulty in finding suitable candidates also led to senior engineers frequently working overtime.

I worked at this company for more than three years. During that time, there were indeed many aspects that I felt needed to change, and with everyone’s cooperation, the company actually improved many of these issues. In the early days, projects were operated without version control, and there was not even a systematic archiving process. However, with everyone’s cooperation, these systems were gradually established and developed in a positive direction. None of this was easy. Moreover, RayArk has only been established for a little over four years and is still a young company. The most important thing in a company is its people; a team can only grow through mutual cooperation and effort.

I believe that a company and its employees can build mutual trust only through working together. As an employee, if you have genuinely contributed your abilities and are willing to consider things from the company’s perspective, your efforts will be seen by the owner and his wife at RayArk. For example, during my time at RayArk, the owner gave me the achievements I hoped for and was willing to let me try taking on significant responsibilities so that I could learn, even though I ultimately did not perform well in a management role. The company also won a major award for one of its projects, which was a source of happiness for me as one of the team members. Furthermore, on the day I decided to announce my departure, the owner was willing to let me continue taking on the company’s work as a freelancer. These were all results of our long-term, pleasant cooperation.

Overall, RayArk is a good company. That is how I feel about it, and it taught me a great deal.

There are indeed some changes and last-minute adjustments during project production, but they can all be brought up for communication and discussion.