1. Located on the National Tsing Hua University campus, so you can enjoy the benefits available to university staff, such as the library, parking lot, and gym (though you also need to have time to use them).

2. The office hardware and equipment are very new. Dual monitors, over-ear headphones, and desktop computers with 8 GB of RAM or more are provided (this is a well-funded team).

3. New employees get exposure to all kinds of tasks and have opportunities to carry out a project from start to finish.

4. The colleagues in the engineering department are easy to get along with and willing to engage in technical exchanges.

My original position was Statistical Assistant (in the Analysis Group). The current team consists of a senior manager; the Analysis Group, which has a junior manager (PM); and the Engineering Group, which is managed by the senior manager and has no engineering manager.

1. Management style

Both groups primarily follow the senior manager’s decisions, including work assignments and whether overtime is allowed. The senior manager assigns the Engineering Group’s work. Matters in the Analysis Group are discussed directly with the senior manager and consulting committee (that is, by asking directly in the Line group); the junior manager does not review things in advance or communicate externally on your behalf.

2. Overtime culture

The interview made the flexible working hours sound very appealing, but the manager tolerates an overtime culture. When the workday ends, you may be asked to clock out first and then return to your desk to continue working. If you want to apply for overtime, you will encounter all kinds of obstacles. You must notify the manager before the end of the workday; if you say you want to apply for overtime after working hours have ended, the request will be rejected as described above (so I never successfully applied for overtime). Also, when I worked overtime without applying for it, the manager never said thank you or acknowledged the effort. (However, if you have a strong desire to devote yourself to Taiwan’s education system, you may not find it tiring.)

3. There is an end-of-day reporting system.

At the end of the workday, you must report the day’s completed tasks and pending items in the team’s Line group. As a result, even when your work is finished, you do not dare leave on time. It also creates a sense of comparison among colleagues: even if you work diligently, you may feel considerable pressure when reporting if you have too few tasks to list.

4. Daily morning meetings

They are described positively as a way to synchronize work information and train speaking skills. You must report what you did yesterday and what you plan to do today. During the probationary period, new employees cannot report that they plan to learn and become familiar with the system; the senior manager will say that this should be done on personal time rather than as team business. Almost every day, you will hear the senior manager reprimanding people (the manager speaks very bluntly), so be mentally prepared and have the psychological resilience to be questioned in front of everyone.

5. System optimization

The Analysis Group’s work includes customer service, system testing, development, planning and analysis, and verification. However, whenever customer service is overwhelmed with frequently asked problems, the team takes a passive attitude toward making changes. They say they encourage new employees to raise issues, but then tell you that you have not participated enough in planning and should look into things more before raising them.

6. Experienced members of the group expect you to understand something after it has been explained once, and they speak very bluntly.

7. Customer service interns

There are intern positions for answering customer service calls, but the manager requires the entire Analysis Group to answer calls, or to pick up any call that comes in while handling your current work (during peak periods, the calls may be nonstop). You have to wait until customer service hours end at 17:30 to work on your own tasks (if you repeatedly fail to finish your work and leave on time, you may be demoted to an intern, haha).

8. Unclear work assignments (no professional PM)

As a Statistical Assistant, although the interview mentioned planning reports, in practice you are expected not only to write SQL and produce reports, but also to analyze data requests from external organizations and independently plan the UI presentation for data entered into the system. You have to request relevant reference materials from other colleagues yourself; the group PM does not proactively help.

9. Points 7 and 8 combined: while extracting data and planning a report, if the phone rings, you must answer it first and help the user resolve the issue before returning to your work. It may also be that I am unable to divide my attention between two tasks, so think about this before applying.

10. Extensive paperwork and standardized formatting requirements

Because the upstream organization is a public-sector department, it inherits the culture of government agencies. Almost every document has standardized formatting requirements, including explanatory documents, UIs, reports, and programs. You need to be patient with document processing. If the system is updated, you have to replace all the images and text in the explanatory documents.

11. Unclear handover

When I took over this position, the junior manager said that the previous employee’s materials were stuck on an old host and that there was no reference material available, so I had to build everything from scratch. However, two weeks later, while discussing something with the junior manager, they suddenly told me that materials planned by the previous employee were available for reference (???). I do not know whether they intentionally withheld them or what, but it inevitably made me feel that they were not proactive about providing help.

12. Lack of respect for professional expertise

When the Statistical Assistant or Engineering Group proposes an optimization or reports an error, unless it can immediately make the system more user-friendly, you may be questioned during the morning meeting: “Who told you to do this?”