Let me first state my position: during my time working here, I was a software engineer.
Having read quite a few previous reviews, most of them describe the situation of the department as a whole, so I’ll mainly focus on the team I was in.
To be honest, the team supervisor (manager) was fairly good at interpersonal relations. Setting aside the verbal promise that, after a project ended, they would request rewards, I have no way to conclusively judge whether they actually spoke up on behalf of the team members. Even if they did speak up, there is no solid basis here to assess whether upper management took it seriously or whether the rewards granted afterward were convincing and satisfactory. Overall, things remained fairly uneventful until I left, and I did not have any major conflicts with the team members.
To summarize the advantages: if you genuinely want to learn about interacting with government procurement projects and understand how a project proceeds from the project manager receiving requirements through full development and delivery, you could consider choosing this workplace. Experience is difficult to come by, after all, and if you hope to gain substantial experience in software development or in interacting with clients, this place is genuinely not bad.
From a purely engineering perspective, if you have read the book Clean Code and want to see examples of the bad practices discussed in the book, you can come here and experience it for yourself. After all, once you have read the book before writing code, it is difficult to fall into the realm of writing such terrible code again.
For the advantages, I mainly focused on the team I worked in; when it comes to the disadvantages, I can only discuss them from every angle.
First, the company holds a quarterly meeting every quarter. The agenda is nothing more than motivational speeches, introductions of new employees, announcements about internal company rules, and so on. Of course, the general manager and vice presidents are also invited to speak.
At every quarterly meeting, the general manager always says, “Hamasen does everything in accordance with the Labor Standards Act.” Anyone who has worked here naturally knows that this is bullshit. Because…
You absolutely will not receive compensatory leave or overtime pay after working overtime!
You absolutely will not receive compensatory leave or overtime pay after working overtime!
You absolutely will not receive compensatory leave or overtime pay after working overtime!
It’s important, so I have to say it three times. It’s not that reporting it is impossible; they just fob it off by claiming that the position is under a managerial/exempt work system.
There is no need to say much about the vice presidents of the two major service departments. The people directly under them have never stopped criticizing them.
To summarize the disadvantages aside from not receiving legally mandated compensation after working overtime:
1. The company’s operational planning lacks foresight.
2. The company’s code is completely disorganized. Everyone does whatever they want with it, exhausting all new and existing employees.
3. Every department holds its own sort of strategy meeting each year and insists that you spend a Saturday or Sunday attending a meeting with the department, but they do not give you a compensatory day off for that day.
There are quite a few other points that were mentioned in previous reviews, so I won’t elaborate on them.