Workplace reviews and discussion: 精聯電子股份有限公司

A good company for slacking off and coasting toward retirement

This is a company with an inexhaustible list of terrible deeds.

The company's slogan is “Because We Care,” but in reality it is “Because We ‘don't’ Care.”

The foul-mouthed junior manager of one of the company's software development departments does not care about software development quality at all. What he cares about is whether the engineers use technologies he knows. If an engineer uses technology he does not know, he will berate the engineer and forcefully demand that they switch back to technology he knows.

The “foul mouth” often tells engineers that he has 20 years of development experience and has held every position in software development, including PGM, SA/SD, and PM. Yet technically, he only knows ASP.NET and does not even know ASP.NET MVC.

Therefore, he strongly insists that engineers use Xamarin to develop Android apps, and that they connect directly to the database in the code. Even after the company began promoting native app development, he still insisted that engineers connect directly to the database in the code, completely avoiding Web APIs and prohibiting engineers from writing additional Web APIs. He gave no consideration whatsoever to information security or app performance. If an API really had to be provided for external parties or vendors to call, the only option was to use the outdated technology of writing a SOAP Web Service with ASMX.

As for the other projects, things were even more absurd under the “foul mouth's” leadership. Although it has long been the Internet age, the “foul mouth” kept promoting WinForms projects, with no architecture whatsoever; the same logic could be scattered repeatedly in different places throughout a project.

At long last, there was an ASP.NET MVC project, but the “foul mouth” never properly clarified the customer's requirements. As a result, engineers worked overtime past midnight every day, with the record reaching 3 a.m. The engineers were forced to work that late, and not only did the “foul mouth” fail to buy them late-night meals, he also rejected their overtime or compensatory-leave applications one by one, leaving the engineers extremely dissatisfied. Later, a senior manager stepped in to mediate and allowed these engineers to apply for one day of “official business leave” each week without coming to the office (“black leave”) to compensate for the overtime.

The “foul mouth's” other deeds are truly too numerous to list. For example, he required engineers to put a great deal of business logic in stored procedures, constantly berating them and claiming that this was the only way to achieve query performance. Yet he had no concept of database normalization when it came to table design: one table could have four primary keys, indexes were never created, and the columns in every table were named TA01, TA02, and so on. When customers often requested small functional changes, he did not follow the company's quoting process. Instead, he secretly modified stored procedures in the customer's database without telling the engineers. When the customer later requested major changes and he had no choice but to go through the company's internal quotation process, the engineers kept making changes that kept failing because the stored procedures in the customer's environment differed from those in the internal test database.

The “foul mouth” constantly tells engineers that he has 20 years of software development experience and has managed many projects, both large and small. Yet when it comes to project management, he knows almost nothing and does not even understand any project management software. He never rejects unreasonable customer demands. If engineers cannot implement something or it would take a great deal of time, he simply berates them. During projects, the “foul mouth” never holds meetings. He believes that everyone sits together and that they only need to ask one another, so he lets engineers argue among themselves and even allows testers to test arbitrarily. Testers always test according to their own feelings, often telling engineers, “I think it should be like this,” but what they “think it should be like” is often not what the customer wants, leaving engineers trapped in an endless cycle of revisions.

The most outrageous part is that the company finally hired an architect to improve its internal software development process, but every improvement proposed by the architect was completely vetoed by the “foul mouth.” Even the architect's proposal to set up GitLab internally to manage projects was vetoed because of the “foul mouth's” overbearing exercise of authority. In the end, the architect could only be reduced to the role of a senior engineer.

The senior manager surnamed Yue clearly knew that the “foul mouth” was making a mess of things, yet continued to turn a blind eye. Whenever an engineer resigned because of dissatisfaction with the “foul mouth,” he would either say, “If the ‘foul mouth’ was making a mess, why didn't you tell me sooner?” or come out with nonsense such as, “The ‘foul mouth’ is the manager I promoted, so I have to give him authority,” and so on.

Apart from that software development department, some of the company's other policies are also outrageous. For example, the offer letter says that salaries will be adjusted after the three-month probationary period, but after three months there was no salary adjustment at all. After employees resigned, their salaries were not deposited on time, and the company even withheld their pay on the pretext that “the company's internal handover had not yet been approved,” treating the Labor Standards Act as if it meant nothing.

If a company has no integrity toward its own employees, how could it possibly have integrity toward its customers? If it does not “Care” about its current employees, how could it be “Because We Care” toward its customers?

What this company really demonstrates is “Because We ‘don't’ Care.”