Workplace reviews and discussion: 威許移動股份有限公司

1. Apart from the technical supervisor, the other colleagues’ technical abilities are quite good, making this a suitable place to hone your skills and learn.

2. My coworkers are real bastards in code reviews, constantly nitpicking my PRs, which made me improve at lightning speed (the technical supervisor doesn’t do code reviews because he can’t understand them).

3. On Fridays, the company places a group order for outside food (everyone can freely choose what to order from a restaurant).

4. The backend team eats pretty well at lunchtime (which has resulted in lots of red flags on my health checkup and lots of money spent).

1. The backend technical supervisor’s technical skills are pathetically poor. He pretends to understand things when he doesn’t, and can only do pure PHP and Bootstrap—and even those poorly. However, he is still the one who discusses requirements and technical matters, so he agrees to requirements he personally thinks are easy, sets extremely short estimates, and expects you to somehow pull them off. He’ll even say, “I think this is just copying Feature A. It’s not difficult, right?”

2. The backend supervisor can’t confirm anything about any requirements. Whenever you confirm a requirement with him, he only replies, “I’m checking with the boss; I asked the PM, but they haven’t replied yet.” In the end, it’s faster to ask the PM yourself—communicating with the supervisor is simply a waste of time.

3. The backend supervisor has serious problems expressing himself. I’ve come to deeply feel that regardless of which school someone attended, or whether they graduated from university or have a master’s degree, there really can be a difference in communication and expression skills. At every meeting, not a single person can understand what language he is speaking. He also refuses to write out and list the requirements first (maybe he types very slowly). Oh, no—when he does type, he doesn’t use punctuation, so no one can understand him anyway.

4. Taking leave at this company is extremely troublesome. Even taking annual leave requires you to state the reason (which indirectly pressures everyone not to take leave).

5. The job postings all say PHP, but the actual work is full-stack plus devOops (React + Laravel + Docker Swarm). You get backend-only pay, yet often have to deploy vendors’ environments in the middle of the night. Overtime is paid at the normal hourly rate, without any multiplier, and more senior colleagues are basically on call 24/7.

6. The company makes you experience all kinds of “Hakka spirit”: save, save, save. Even expenses for essential development tools have to be cut.

7. The supervisor loves to say, “Just implement this feature exactly as I said. Don’t consider so many scenarios. I’ll take responsibility if anything goes wrong.” Then his so-called responsibility means telling you to modify it into the feature the vendor wants within an absurdly short time—despite that scenario having already been mentioned as a possibility.

8. When you submit your resignation, the company’s supervisors all pretend not to see it. Only after you say that you want to use up your annual leave do they say they need to arrange a handover, and that you can take leave only after it has been arranged—then they continue to ignore you.

9. The company underreports your Labor Insurance salary.

10. The technical supervisor doesn’t understand servers, so he argues that users can’t get in because you didn’t configure Nginx properly. Later, it turned out that the AWS firewall—which only he could configure—had not been opened.

11. Meetings with the supervisor take half a day, compressing the development schedule, and the next day he still asks why you haven’t finished.

12. If you don’t resign, you don’t get a raise. If you resign, they either say goodbye or offer you a raise. The company always has this attitude of, “If you want a raise, you should ask me for one.” And if you don’t work enough unpaid overtime voluntarily—that is, overtime without overtime pay—you’re unlikely to get a raise.

13. The requirement existed 2–3 months ago, but by the time it was assigned to you, it had to be deployed to the vendor’s environment three days later.

14. The laptops provided are 100% second-hand computers bought by the company: defective in one way or another, with batteries nearly at the end of their lives (going from fully charged to 0% within 20 minutes), and the company is unwilling to replace them.

15. The senior manager tells everyone that the organization is flat, while the technical supervisor continues to enforce a hierarchy (perhaps trying to hide the fact that he is actually useless?).