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

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The author is an engineer who escaped from this company.

There was an extremely senior engineer at the company who always had many excuses and pushed responsibility onto others whenever something happened. I will refer to him as “Bulldozer” below.

When my manager instructed me to take over maintenance of “Bulldozer’s” project, the nightmare began. There was no documentation or explanation of the project details during the handover; he only said, “Everything is in the code.” In the end, I was able to understand the program’s overall functionality only through hands-on investigation and by finding documentation for the earliest version in the company’s files.

For one project, I happened to work with “Bulldozer” on the same development effort. After completing my part, he needed a customized component for a feature he was developing, so he asked me to help create it. Once development was complete, I moved on from the project. Later, “Bulldozer” discovered that some functions had not been considered when the component was originally developed, but he was unwilling to add them himself. Instead, he pushed the problem onto me, saying that because I had developed the component, I was responsible for completing it. Thus, relying on his “seniority,” he pressured me into finishing the feature for him.

Later, the senior manager wanted to develop a library for shared use by the development department and assigned “Bulldozer” to oversee it and plan the development work. However, “Bulldozer” passed the work on to the engineers under him. He only recorded the development time and which library was being developed. The engineers below him were left to decide what functionality the library should contain, and development could proceed only with the agreement of all engineers. He also showed no concern for the development progress; whenever the senior manager asked about it, he shifted the blame to the engineers below him and claimed that none of it was his responsibility.

The library maintenance was even more astonishing to me. The library shared by the department was not maintained collectively. Instead, the people who developed it were responsible for maintaining it themselves. Bugs and feature requests were sent to the original developers, rather than being adjusted through pull requests reviewed collectively by the department. I found this extremely shocking.

In the end, unable to tolerate this kind of development environment any longer, I chose to escape from the company.