1. The engineers and team members are relatively young (almost all are recent graduates or interns, because the company mainly recruits people who have just graduated or have no experience with information technology projects)

2. There is a free coffee machine, annual health checkups, and free lunch

3. The company offers a combined subsidy of NT$3,000, which can be used for travel or training

4. You receive seven days of paid sick leave per year from your first day of employment

A. A “happy company” that claims to have government-affiliated backing, but what about the employee benefits and work environment?

－ Each developer is provided with a laptop, but the screen is small and painfully slow. Applying for an external monitor requires repeated reminders before anything gets done.

The equipment provided by headquarters is among the most outrageous I’ve seen: one traditional 17-inch LCD monitor per person.

－ The chair legs are unstable, so while coding you also have to worry about whether you might be thrown to the floor one day.

－ There is a snack cabinet, but you have to pay to eat anything (supposedly employee benefits at half price; items that have been offered during the Ghost Festival get an extra discount).

－ Job listings on 104 mention things like massage chairs and employee-benefit courses, but none of these are available outside headquarters.

－ The old office has been overcrowded for a long time, and there are not enough restrooms. At the beginning of the year, the senior boss grandly announced that they would move, but by the end of the year there was still no sign of it (I heard the boss thought the new office was too expensive... and that was the end of the matter).

－ There is no dedicated administrative staff, so miscellaneous tasks are assigned to whoever seems easiest to dump them on.

B. Poor office efficiency and highly bureaucratic internal communication

－ The development environment is incredibly noisy. Business development staff all work in the same room, so you constantly hear them talking on the phone. Sometimes senior employees even use LINE with speakerphone on during calls.

－ There is no dedicated person answering the office switchboard. The unwritten rule is that new employees help answer the phone. Often the calls are for customer service, sales, or system issues, making things extremely chaotic. When the Taipei headquarters cannot be reached by phone, people Google the Taichung office number and randomly call that instead. The company website refuses to publish a customer-service number, because whenever major systems such as 1922 or the five-times stimulus vouchers go live, the office phone lines become completely overwhelmed.

－ They love using LINE as an internal communication tool. The company has actually purchased Teams, but accommodates a group of older managers simply because they are “used to it.” As a result, you get pulled into a huge number of project groups for sales and PM-related work. In other words, receiving private messages or @ mentions from managers and clients after work or while on vacation is an everyday occurrence.

－ You also have to fill out a work log every day. If you fail to do so several times, your opportunities for annual promotion will be deducted.

－ The company’s internal processes have a strong bureaucratic atmosphere. Administrative efficiency is poor and traditional, and there are more rules than in a government agency.

C. Development processes and training???

- The roles of PM, SA, RD, and QA are unclear. Because there are too many projects, you may simultaneously be the PM, SA, and RD for different projects. By the way, there is no dedicated QA.

－ PMs are extremely inexperienced. Schedule planning is unbelievably poor, and development timelines are compressed every single time. Sudden, meteorite-like requirements often arrive, deadlines are casually announced and made extremely tight, and only after delivery do they say “balabala”; then the project is put on hold for several months before finally going live.

－ Documentation is provided only when they feel like it. Sometimes you are told to start work without any documentation, and only after you finish do they take it to the client to ask whether it is acceptable.

－ Training is incomplete. A manager says one sentence and dumps the task on you, leaving the RDs to figure everything out through telepathy.

－ You are often assigned to support projects at the Taipei headquarters. In particular, over the past few years, several major government projects have frequently required people to rotate in and out.

－ This was the first time I saw Git being used while SVN was still used for version control. Truly eye-opening.

D. Authoritarian and traditional management style, with no room for dialogue between labor and management

- Business orientation >>> technical quality and ability. As an RD, writing good code is not essential; instead, you need to know how to create presentations that managers can understand. (By the way, don’t include too much technical detail—the older people won’t understand it.)

－ Whether overtime is approved depends on the manager’s mood. Whether you are allowed to claim overtime is also up to them. If there is no budget, just swallow it and work a little more; the company calls this a demonstration of teamwork. By the way, if a manager @mentions you on LINE during a holiday to write a report, or asks you to cooperate with an online system operation on a holiday, the unwritten rule is that you (yourself) cannot claim overtime. The manager says this demonstrates team cooperation and rapport.

－ Officially, you can choose between overtime pay and compensatory leave, but there is no budget... The unwritten rule is to choose compensatory leave (yourself).

－ If you have a problem or suggestion and want to raise it, you cannot speak honestly. As soon as you refuse to comply or make a suggestion that does not suit the manager’s mood, you may be threatened with being fired, or your promotion and probation period may be suppressed under some fabricated pretext.