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To put it simply in one sentence: people are the problem.

People are scarier than ghosts.

Let’s start with the structure of this company. The company belongs to a certain group, which has led to several strange situations: 1. There is only one meeting room, but if the group president—the highest-ranking president—needs to use it, no one else can. In other words, the company has no meeting room. 2. In terms of staffing, the company appears to have an administrative position and something resembling a marketing position. The strange thing is that they both exist only “partially” within this company. The group needs these people’s assistance, and the general manager cannot say no. Relationships between groups and subsidiaries are common in business, so why not recruit people separately to fill these positions? Because this company can never escape the fate of losing money. It has no money to add staff and can only share personnel with the group, let alone give raises. As a software company, surely it can’t cut corners on equipment, right? Wrong. If the VM is slow, you wait; if a remote meeting suddenly disconnects, you wait for some kind person to mail a new router from Kaohsiung. That is how frugal and environmentally friendly this company is.

The company’s general manager is naturally inseparable from all of the chaos described above. He is a leader with a very high opinion of himself. He can constantly recount his past experiences; he can tell the same story to three people in one day; he can do it when you join the company, when you leave, and when you turn to him for help. Word for word, it will take at least two hours. His dislike of people is remarkably equal-opportunity. If someone is useful, he praises them; if not, he mocks them—behind their back.

Take the company’s Project Department, which has the highest turnover rate among all departments—the department where the general manager also serves as project supervisor. The PMs’ disastrous exodus can be seen from a few figures: 1. The company went through 17 PMs within three years. 2. A major project has gone through no fewer than five PMs (five is merely an average), and still cannot be closed. The general manager attributes this to problems with the SOP. PMs do not need to be R&D personnel; anyone can do it. Incidentally, a maintenance specialist only needs to answer the phone. There are no so-called principles for assigning projects: whatever the previous person handled when they left, the newcomer handles. Their experience levels can differ by more than an entire career generation; as long as the salary is cheap, that’s enough. With this kind of hiring policy, it is difficult for employees not to eventually have all their enthusiasm worn away. Speaking of resignations, for those who have just been offered a position and are wondering whether to accept the offer, here is something to keep in mind: there is no handover. All there are are videos intended for client training—videos that are neither suitable for training newcomers nor concise.

The remote meetings mentioned above include a fixed PM-RD meeting every Thursday, attended by PMs from the Project Department, maintenance specialists from the Operations and Maintenance Department, and two development department managers based in Kaohsiung. The purpose of this meeting is for PMs and maintenance specialists to report the tickets that need assistance from R&D that week. Later, however, it became merely a formality. The number of inserted tickets even exceeded those going through the normal scheduling process, once again contradicting the supposed importance of the SOP. Most R&D staff are located in Kaohsiung; there are only two project R&D staff members in Taipei. This arrangement likewise stems from money: find people wherever it is cheaper. Returning to the first sentence of this review, apart from the two managers who attend the meeting, most of the colleagues in Kaohsiung require an enormous amount of communication effort to get things done. “Communication effort” is the most tactful term I can think of. First, being separated across two locations makes communicating by text particularly inconvenient. If you happen to work with one of the few R&D staff members who can communicate directly, you can call them and share your screen to confirm that both sides understand each other. Some people would be better suited to being professors, but were held back by becoming R&D staff; they can only satisfy their urge to lecture, teach, and answer questions during communication. They have time to write lengthy essays, but no time to communicate directly with the person who opened the ticket. Their time is valuable, while the maintenance specialist or PM who opened the ticket must respond immediately; otherwise, they will close the ticket themselves: no further information, case closed.

For all job seekers consulting this company’s reputation because of the vacancies posted on job websites: whether in the Operations and Maintenance Department or the Project Department, these vacancies were definitely not created by business expansion, but by a wave of resignations. The head of the Operations and Maintenance Department has also resigned. If you are mentally resilient and have a very high tolerance for verbal phrasing, you can give it a try.