1. The best retirement haven for people who want to lie flat or those with pure bloodlines

(provided you pick a unit where you can lie flat, have a military-retiree/military-service background, or are related through close-kin breeding)

2. Work in a staff unit at the new new campus—congratulations, because many employees from other campuses, overseas units, and those on business trips are contributing their productivity for you, allowing you to splendidly lie flat while sucking on the nation’s blood

0. Self-identification: A place that pretends to do R&D but is really procurement. Are there really employees who are proud to work at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology? Do they really think they are contributing to the nation?

1. Job openings: There are fewer and fewer units where you can lie flat. If your bloodline isn’t pure, you’ll definitely be treated as a leek; on top of that, personnel hiring is currently frozen (in ROC Year 111), permanent positions are scarce, and most openings are fixed-term contracts. You’re not just a leek, but a disposable, timed-to-be-discarded leek. Great!

2. How damn frustrating it is: If you’re in a technical group collaborating with a project unit, then you’re fucking doomed. As for project bonuses, the staff unit takes more than half first, the project gets a share of what remains, and only then does anything reach the technical group. Yet the technical group is the one that has to do the most work on every project. Working overtime for nothing, getting nitpicked over procurement cases, engineers doing PM work, technicians doing engineers’ work, administrators doing technicians’ work, being set up to take the fall, and getting chewed out by supervisors for no reason are all everyday occurrences. (P.S. Be sure to investigate projects with particularly bad reputations beforehand; otherwise, once you take one over, you may not be able to get rid of it.)

3. Performance evaluations: You will definitely get a pay raise during the first five years. After more than five years, getting only a hundred-dollar increase each year or being stuck with a B-grade evaluation is commonplace. There are additional performance bonuses, but you can work yourself to death and still earn the same amount as the people who lie flat.

4. Technology: The technology is absolutely a long way behind the industry, especially in software development. You might even get crushed by a computer science undergraduate intern. The in-house development environment is atrocious, and there is also a mountain of meaningless paperwork.

5. Promotion: Hahahaha. Without connections, you might as well remain an entry-level employee forever. Even if you really do make it into management, you won’t be able to control the idle royal relatives underneath you; you can only become a “high-level entry-level employee” with a supervisor’s title but none of a supervisor’s real authority.

6. Summary: Of course, if your abilities aren’t great and you can’t find a good job elsewhere, you can still package yourself better during the interview or pull some strings to get in and try to lie flat. After all, this place is about being less bad, not being good. Everyone is living off the state anyway, and there’s no difference between eating while standing and eating while lying down.