Workplace reviews and discussion: 神達電腦股份有限公司

Most colleagues are easy to get along with and communicate with.

Since the bait post I wrote last time already lured in a certain defender, this time I’m offering a mild review.

First, to clarify, I’m talking about the department I worked in. I don’t know about the others, but I don’t think they would be much different, so I’ll just mention a few key points:

1. In my personal opinion, performance reviews have no clear objectives. Whether your performance review is good or bad depends on how a certain senior executive views your working hours, whether you regularly work overtime, the number of Jira issues you resolve, or their impression of you. If you made a bad first impression, then no matter how long you stay, I don’t think it’s easy to turn things around.

2. As for the number of Jira issues, anyone working in an R&D unit for product development should know that Jira is a platform where DQE tests products and opens issues for RD to fix. But here, whether you are considered to be working depends on the number of Jira issues you resolve. Moreover, the R&D unit itself has to open the Jira issues. In other words, R&D does the testing, spends time testing to find problems, and opens issues itself—a self-generated, self-consumed concept. So the more issues you open, the better; then you resolve them yourself, and only then do senior executives think you are actually working. Let me explain what I mean by opening Jira issues indiscriminately: suppose changing one UI image file counts as one issue. If you need to change 50 images, you can open 50 issues. Then your output is 50 Jira issues. I know it’s meaningless, but management just likes looking at numbers, much like they look at working hours, without understanding what the content actually is. So when you are working on a relatively difficult issue that takes several days, if they see that you haven’t resolved a single issue over those few days, they will complain about whether your workload is too light or something.

3. Regarding compensation, older employees get more money and have less work, while younger employees get less money and have more work. That’s roughly how I would describe it. Young employees’ salary levels are even worse than those in traditional manufacturing in central Taiwan. Even though salaries are rising across the broader environment, MiTAC has not kept up, so relatively speaking, it will only fall further and further behind.

4. The company as a whole does not seem to make much money. Revenue is sustained mainly by the group’s investment-holding operations, so I also feel that its prospects are getting worse and worse.

People considering joining can use this as a reference. Everything I said above is about the department I worked in and does not represent the entire company.