Workplace reviews and discussion: 榕懋實業股份有限公司

Interviews actually depend a lot on whether the interviewer takes a liking to you. The HR person showing me around explained that when the boss walks into the interview room, you need to stand up and say, “Hello, boss.” I didn’t really think much of this. After the boss came in, he first asked me to give a three-minute self-introduction. He didn’t really ask about my expertise and tended to just chat casually.

Well, they just don’t give raises. During the interview, they said that salary adjustments would be made “depending on the circumstances,” but it wasn’t until my third year, when my supervisor was secretly replaced, that I got an extra NT$1,000. They also treated the contributions of professional staff as if they were invisible. You can go there to coast until retirement, and you can learn all sorts of miscellaneous things, but I’m sorry—the salary simply will not go up. I was a fresh graduate, and by my third year there seemed to be fewer than 10 people in the whole company whose age was close to mine (within about three years). The workforce is mostly middle-aged and older. As for the production processes, they use 1980s technology and manual assembly, so everything is very, very, very slow—and mistakes still happen. People also do things based on their mood. A few departments work overtime like crazy, even though overtime is the least efficient thing possible, and they’re even proud of competing over it. Some departments also target the technical departments, attacking them and pressuring them to give in, then dumping the blame on the technical departments when problems arise later. They’re incredibly useless. On top of that, upper-level positions are either predetermined or reserved for relatives and favorites. People like us who come from ordinary backgrounds—and are young—aren’t going to move up. Don’t worry about that. If you want to learn things, you can, but just stay for two or three years. After that… well, you know.

Supervisors may use a little emotional blackmail on you, saying things like, “You’re not going to work overtime?” When you take leave, there are always one or two long-timers who usually take advantage of others, but still refuse to make concessions when someone else takes leave. They pressured me into giving way twice. Fortunately, neither of those two occasions involved anything serious. If it had been a major matter, I definitely would have found an opportunity to get back at you.

When I initially wanted to learn more, I reviewed my time allocation and submitted it to my supervisor, but the supervisor still wouldn’t let me go study. Later, I submitted it again to a supervisor one level higher, who approved it, so I was able to free up time to study off-site. Fortunately, I passed, so I left~ Good luck to the company. It won’t make any difference without me; I’m just an ordinary person who stayed for three years. I only compiled my learning experiences into more than 20 files, optimized the work processes, and kept proposing—and creating from scratch—electronic work procedures. I’m not important at all. To everyone thinking about interviewing here, good luck!