Workplace reviews and discussion: 薇思克股份有限公司

This should be considered a Japanese company. Not long after I joined, the owner changed: the original Japanese owner sold the company to another company, and someone from Singapore was brought in as the general manager of the Taiwan headquarters. I’m not sure about the internal details.

When you join, keep the invoices and receipts for the health examination and shoe purchases. If you work for three months, the company can reimburse those costs.

The workday starts very early, at six, because the custard is made and delivered on the same day, and it has to be delivered before the department stores open. The company does not have its own stores; all locations are shop-in-shop counters.

The factory only makes the custard, while the retail counters do the baking.

The earliest I started was at five, and the latest was at seven, so the end of the workday was also very early. There was no traffic on the way to work or on the way home. Personally, I like getting up early and finishing work early, so it wasn’t a problem for me. However, many of my coworkers were relatively young, and getting up early was very difficult for them.

Because all the production processes had to be completed before shipping, overtime was generally not required. From the time I joined until I left, I only worked overtime a few times. There were not many opportunities for overtime unless the work could not be finished, and the company did not really want employees to work overtime.

The company was located in an office building in a relatively remote area. Having your own means of transportation would be ideal. Since work started early, it was easy to find a motorcycle parking space nearby. The surrounding lots had not yet been developed, so the scenery in the early morning was beautiful and quiet.

Considering the salary, working hours, and simple nature of the work, I think it is acceptable.

If you don’t like getting up early, you won’t like this job.

It is very inconvenient without your own transportation.

One disadvantage of this job is that the factory had only been operating for about six or almost seven years. Unlike a large factory, which can easily have more than a hundred employees, this was a small factory with fewer than ten people, excluding office staff, and it had a serious gap in seniority and experience.

A few months before I joined, the factory manager resigned. When I arrived, there was no factory manager, so another supervisor in the factory was temporarily managing it. She was also the most senior person there, having worked there from the factory’s establishment until then. The second-most senior employee had been there for less than a year. Can you see the problem?

There were few employees, but a major gap in seniority. I heard that the previous factory manager had very high standards and was extremely strict. Many people who couldn’t tolerate it eventually left. The supervisor currently responsible for the factory was much the same: she was moody, emotionally volatile, and would harshly berate new employees.

Although the work itself was simple, the pace was fast, there were many miscellaneous tasks, and it was very busy. Anyone slacking off would be harshly reprimanded.

At least, that was how things were during the early period of my employment. My coworkers at the time were all very capable, until the factory supervisor drove them away with her behavior. I worked there for more than a year, and every coworker who had been there when I joined had left by the time I did. It was all related to the supervisor.

She may have realized this. People either left after being scolded or were driven away by her behavior. In addition, new hires either stopped showing up after a day or two, or those who came later were not as capable as the previous employees and could not withstand the scolding.

A new factory manager arrived, but this manager did not come into the factory area to work. The supervisor in our factory may have been unhappy about that, so she moved her desk outside and stopped entering the factory as well. She would only show up when needed and hid outside the rest of the time. She did not manage the factory or its employees; as long as the work was completed and people could leave on time, that was enough.

After I left, the person with the longest tenure there had only just reached one year.

The work itself was not difficult, but there were management problems. On top of that, the owner changed during my time there—when the owner changes, the whole approach changes. As far as the factory operations were concerned, I felt there were serious problems.