Workplace reviews and discussion: 工研院 _財團法人工業技術研究院

Although there are plenty of snacks and appliances that look nice and are available for use, they are unwilling to pay overtime in accordance with the basic requirements of the Labor Standards Act. I do not think the company offers good benefits. The only advantage here is probably that it is very easy to transition from a temporary worker to a permanent employee, because the turnover rate is very high XDD. So if you are willing to be sufficiently subservient and cater to what they like (become the kind of person they like), you should be able to become a permanent employee quickly. However, you will then have to face many illegal and unreasonable practices. It is also said that after becoming a permanent employee, transferring to another department requires going through tremendous difficulty—or is easier if you know someone there.

1. This position is primarily a project staff role under the Industrial Development Bureau’s electric scooter promotion program. In addition to handling the KPIs within the project, you also have to deal with a pile of ad hoc assignments from the Industrial Development Bureau. These often take up an entire day, leaving no time to do your actual work. The workload is extremely heavy. Whenever the Industrial Development Bureau asks for information, it is always urgent and rushed—for example, they may ask for it at 9 a.m. and require it by 2 p.m., and you often still have to revise the materials after work—so you frequently have to stay late to handle those requests as well as the work you were originally supposed to do. However, there is no overtime pay.

2. The department is extremely proud of its preparation of meeting logistics and reference materials, and takes it to the point of overdoing things. For example, they record the supervisors’ food and beverage preferences, and orders must follow those preferences; if you do not order according to them, you will be harshly reprimanded. We also often have to bring drinks when we go elsewhere for meetings XDD (I thought we were Uber Eats). As for the reference materials, sometimes the document format is considered more important than the content (to an almost obsessive degree). The content is basically just recycled from old materials, and overall, I feel that my professional skills did not grow much during my time there.

3. The colleagues are generally very nice, but there is hardly any time to interact because everyone is extremely busy. As for the supervisor, that is another story. In addition to having an inflated ego, the supervisor refuses to take responsibility and often assigns work mindlessly, leaving employees at a loss. Sometimes even very simple matters are made unnecessarily complicated. Communicating with the supervisor also does not guarantee that your ideas will be accepted. For example, something that could clearly be handled with a simple external response may instead be affected by the higher-ups’ political considerations, so you have to find a way to accommodate the supervisor’s views rather than deal with the matter itself. It feels as though the guns are pointed inward instead of everyone working together against external parties. In addition, the supervisor considers anything that cannot be completed outside working hours to be a sign of insufficient ability on your part, rather than recognizing that there is simply too much work to finish. Overtime is not paid in accordance with the Labor Standards Act, but through a distorted bonus system instead—and even that is not guaranteed, while the amount paid does not correspond to the number of overtime hours worked. Overall, the work pressure is extremely high.