Workplace reviews and discussion: 新光金融控股股份有限公司(新光金控/新光人壽/新光銀行/新光投信)

Paid annual leave is granted to you directly, so you do not have to wait six months to receive it. The salary is only slightly higher than that for entry-level employees in the software industry elsewhere. Benefits improve after you have been there for more than a year, but they are limited to company stock options and a few minor perks (such as departmental trips). Once you endure long enough to be promoted into management, the salary should not be bad, but conservatively speaking, it takes more than five years. Annual raises are slow; changing jobs would get you more. You learn business logic of uncertain value.

The system is extremely rigid and is a destroyer of IT personnel. Basically, most people who join are either career-changing, junior-level coders or fresh graduates from private schools. Ambitious newcomers leave after about a year. The company is always recruiting; even during the pandemic, young newcomers still resigned. Therefore, if you stay for more than a year, you may become the most senior person in the unit, because those with more seniority may already have changed jobs and moved to better financial companies.

Whether it is the Investment Department on the 8th floor or the Life Insurance Department on the 6th floor, it is the same: cumbersome administrative procedures and highly controlled information-security issues. The senior employees are actually also more or less newcomers, so the programs they write naturally contain many bugs and are difficult to read and modify. Everyone knows the skill level of the programmers who receive these programs, and those who are unable to deal with them after muddling through for about a year all leave. Managers at the level of department head and above are only responsible for holding meetings, not for program development or problem-solving.

The most exhausted people there are assistant managers, project managers, and systems analysts. Every day they are responsible for receiving tasks and assigning them to team members under their sections. Even programmers who have stayed for more than a year may not necessarily be able to work independently. When more senior colleagues are present, you have to seize the opportunity to learn from them and take on the systems and tasks they handle. Once those senior colleagues leave, the existing team members have to absorb all of the work.

The company pursues work attitude and correctness rather than new technology or rationality, so completing tasks and doing them quickly is more important. The mindset of IT professionals will be seriously challenged here. On the one hand, the table fields used internally are designed for processes, not for the proper planning, rationality, and performance expected by information professionals. The Investment Department’s tools are somewhat similar to those used by software companies outside: development and integration using C# with LINQ, .NET, and WinForms.

There is no need to say much about the Life Insurance Department. Many units there hardly develop programs in Java. The main work is developing PL/SQL package database programs. All the business logic for each section is written in the Oracle database, and Java development is almost never performed. Spring MVC is merely used to present internal systems to users through JSP; you will not be casually allowed to change the architecture or historical content.

Information security is locked down very tightly. You generally cannot use resources available online, and PL/SQL learning resources are extremely scarce. You can only learn the basics and then jump straight into package development. Testing with data is very difficult; data is retrieved using package SQL for verification. It is very difficult to populate all the relevant tables with dummy data at once, and the WHERE conditions make it impossible to handle forged test data. API testing with Postman is practically nonexistent in many sections. The Investment Department’s development specifications are relatively detailed and complete, while the Life Insurance Department downstairs uses request forms or explanations in email text; business logic is developed with PL/SQL, so its readability is easy to imagine. Finally, departments with many long-serving employees are either extremely relaxed and suitable for retirement, or extremely problematic, with all the young people refusing to stay and leaving. I believe most of you can guess which is more likely.

In terms of career prospects, almost every year newcomers leave after completing just one year. After all, the pay is low (around NT$500,000 annually), there are many miscellaneous tasks, and you spend all day chasing the progress of those tasks. The annual raise is 4% of your annual salary. There is hardly any technical substance inside. Unless you are here to learn business logic, coming here will only cause your technical skills to deteriorate further; after a few years, it will be technically impossible to move to a vendor-side company.

Of course, it is actually not bad as a temporary stepping stone. Quite a few people probably leave for other financial companies after one year or a few years; higher pay is what matters most. Shin Kong only gives you a salary that is enough to keep you neither full nor starving. How you live your life is ultimately your own decision, not Shin Kong’s.