Workplace reviews and discussion: 俊良貿易股份有限公司

1. Public transportation is fairly convenient; there are buses, the MRT, and YouBike.

2. The office has a water dispenser, coffee machine, microwave, and rice cooker.

1. A standard traditional Taiwanese company in the traditional manufacturing sector, which considers itself the TSMC of its field. During the interview, you take two tests—logic questions that are like brainteasers and an error-spotting test—and they tell you that you are very, very smart. The managers are all related to the owner by blood. You may have to stay for ten years before you have a chance at promotion or a raise. If you do get a raise, it is treated as a tremendous blessing for employees, so you should be grateful.

2. When a new employee arrives, they can’t wait to hand everything over to the newcomer and then leave them on their own. New employees are expected to be very smart and understand everything after hearing it once. If you ask colleagues questions, you receive an attitude completely different from their friendly manner during the handover. No one wants to take the awful assignments, so employees will say they have forgotten everything and cannot serve as substitutes. The managers also have no way to do anything about it.

3. The company is almost entirely female, and the office atmosphere is very dreary. The new hires brought in recently all look like well-behaved, conservative types. The company is also not very welcoming to newcomers, probably because new employees do not tend to stay very long. Non-full-time employees who leave promptly at the end of the workday will be reprimanded, so naturally the office culture is to leave late.

4. Bring your own toilet paper. They are extremely stingy with the toilet paper and hand towels in the restroom. Printing must always be done on scrap paper, especially documents for the owner’s family to see—particularly anything for the owner. If you use new paper, you will also be reprimanded.

5. There are many things the owner does not like employees doing. For example, wearing hats: if you feel cold and get a headache, you can only turn off the air conditioning, but then colleagues on the other side will feel hot. The owner also does not like employees lingering in the pantry. If you see the owner’s dishes, you have to wash them, and you may also be assigned to microwave other people’s lunch boxes. The employees assigned to duty have to take out the trash from the restroom and the owner’s family’s office, and steam lunch boxes.

6. The alternating work-from-home arrangement during the pandemic was absurd. The reason given was: if someone worked from home for two consecutive days, they would be unable to print things and therefore unable to work. Most colleagues also preferred returning to the office because the computers at home were small and inconvenient. Like the government’s vaccine procurement, the work rotation was supposedly planned far ahead, but it did not begin until more than two or three weeks after the outbreak had grown significantly. I heard they surveyed employees’ willingness and the procedures at the beginning of the year, yet after nearly half a year there was still no plan at all. All they did was convert documents to PDFs and claim that the company’s automation was impressive.

7. Colleagues do not know how to use Excel keyboard shortcuts; they still use the right mouse button to copy and paste. Meetings with overseas clients are scheduled outside the company’s working hours because of the time difference, and they keep whining to colleagues about how pitiful they are. When they leave their desks during work to make coffee in the pantry, they keep pestering colleagues to chat. Reports require pivot tables, but every time they do one, they repeat the same actions from scratch. They may have a lot of free time at work; roughly one-third of their time is spent chatting and laughing in the pantry, then they stay late to create the appearance of being hardworking. They like to repeat and redo the same tasks several times, cannot integrate data, and open a bunch of Excel files to cut and paste, while thinking they are extremely busy.

8. The company is very large, so if there is a computer problem, you have to ask MIS to check it. They often handle it remotely; otherwise, MIS would not spend even thirty seconds personally appearing and walking to your desk. During the work rotation, the computer setup was also handled in several separate stages: first they set up your VPN, a few days later they set up the company’s messaging software, and later they set up the printer, fax machine, and so on. It seemed like they were trying to create the appearance of being busy.

9. The probationary period is four months. Whether you pass depends on how many folders you have in the shared drive. The richer the contents, the easier it may be to pass. If you organize everything too neatly, your probationary period may be extended.

If you like convenient transportation and do not want to get too close to your colleagues, you may want to consider this company. It should suit you very well.