Workplace reviews and discussion: 資通電腦股份有限公司

1. Flexible leave-taking.

2. The work is not difficult.

3. The median employee salary is around one million.

4. There is a monthly meeting where you can tell your supervisor about any difficulties you are facing and request job adjustments or assistance.

1. Overtime can only be compensated with leave. Since I was often asked to assist with extra tasks on Saturdays and Sundays, I accumulated quite a lot of leave. As a result, during the four months before I resigned, I effectively had a three-day weekend every week.

2. The work is very simple, and you are not actually that important to the company. However, if you are willing to work, they will assign you more tasks, but that does not necessarily mean you will receive a good performance evaluation. They might say that you spent most of your time doing work for another team.

Although the tasks are all simple, you are treated like a general utility worker. For example: backend service maintenance, RD, testing (not just unit testing), DBA, environment setup, and even fortune-telling. This is especially true when you encounter certain strange PMs: whenever a customer’s computer has a problem, the call is immediately transferred to you, as if the customer’s own IT department had no responsibility at all.

Because the work is simple, handovers are done carelessly. I once had to upgrade a program version without receiving any documentation or source code. The code could not be found because of the previous person, who also pretended nothing was wrong. In the end, I had to upgrade it step by step from a version nearly 10 years old. Something that should originally have taken only a few weeks ended up taking me three or four months, including testing functions, tracking issues, handling customer complaints, and so on. I also encountered an SA with poorly written programs who repeatedly changed the specifications, only to ask me to change everything back four months later.

3. According to 104, the median employee salary is indeed over one million, but that probably refers to people who have worked there for more than 10 years. I did not see anyone who started at the lowest PG rank and exceeded one million within 10 years. (I did not stay for 10 years; this is based on my investigation.)

4. You can raise issues at the monthly meeting, but that does not mean they will be resolved or improved. I raised issues for more than half a year, and there was absolutely no improvement.

There are problems with work allocation. You should keep a low profile at work—do not let too many people know that you work quickly and accurately, or you will be assigned a pile of extra work. Some long-term employees will pretend not to hear you or drag things out when you ask them about something, or they will come out afterward to take credit once you have solved it.

I remember one case particularly clearly: the company told me to take on a new job and said they would find someone to take over my old work later, asking me to hold on for six months.

After six months had passed, they said that because I had spent those six months doing work for another team, my performance evaluation would be near the bottom. During those six months, I had just transferred teams, and my supervisor’s instructions were to learn a new framework and similar things while continuing to handle my old responsibilities. I approached it with a very positive and proactive attitude, yet I received this kind of treatment. I was deeply hurt.

After six months, they still had not found anyone to take over, so I had to keep holding on. In the end, I endured it for another nine months. Nothing improved, I could not see any hope, and I resigned because I felt psychologically unbalanced and unfairly treated.

5. The company mainly serves the banking industry’s foreign-exchange systems. Compared with engineers in other technology industries, the pay is poor, and the programming requirements are not demanding enough that someone cannot be replaced at any time. If you can program, you should go work on firmware or embedded systems involving things like C socket programming. The starting point may be the same, but after three or five years, your salary should be able to double directly.

6. There are no malicious coworkers or office politics in this company, but there are many people who take advantage of others’ work. They praise you for being good at programming and ask you for help; if you refuse, they give you dirty looks and talk about you behind your back. There are also people who will burst into tears right in the meeting room, as if you were a sinner for not helping them.

Objectively speaking:

Items 2 and 6 may be due to my bad luck, and “may” not be problems with the company itself.

Everyone is welcome to apply and give it a try. If you do not have the ability to independently develop or operate services, you can go in and experience it for yourself.