Workplace reviews and discussion: 凌誠科技股份有限公司

Employee benefits-

For Kaohsiung, this is considered a company that complies with the Labor Standards Act. The company is located in the Kaohsiung Science Park.

The company has an employee welfare committee, with a monthly afternoon-tea quota.

The office occupies two floors. There are more people on the 10th floor, so the seating is somewhat cramped for everyone.

Colleagues-

Relations among colleagues are fairly pleasant.

But supervisors are... a matter of personal opinion.

Having a good supervisor is like going to heaven, but unfortunately, you will not know which team you will be assigned to when you join.

Company systems-

The company mainly focuses on agricultural systems. It has agricultural management ERPs for small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as government contracts (the Council of Agriculture and the Agriculture and Food Agency),

so half of the company’s employees graduated in agriculture-related technology fields, while the other half graduated in information-related fields.

Company culture-

The company’s general manager, deputy general manager, and most key positions are held by the company’s four original founders.

However, because the four founders established the company immediately after graduation without experience in the outside industry, they often use very narrow-minded perspectives to PUA employees.

After all, they have been in senior positions for many years, while practical work is delegated to people below them. As a result, they evaluate employees from a self-assumed perspective, expect employees to work and contribute like robots, and judge everything solely by results, without empathizing with employees or viewing their efforts from a more humane perspective.

They treat employees like robots and disposable chopsticks, and do not care about employees’ abilities. What they promote verbally is inconsistent with how those actually in charge implement things. Basically, they only like obedient employees without opinions—good children who do whatever the company says. (Employees who enjoy being PUAed.)

(The comments from former employees posted on Tianyancha 6–7 years ago show that nothing has improved since then.)

Management ability-

This company is mainly divided into three departments (originally four). The company only allows people who have been there a long time—not necessarily those with ability—to rise to senior positions.

Therefore, what this company values is knowing how to manage upward, writing polished presentations and performance reports for top management,

while most department heads do their best to keep writing about how good and outstanding they are instead of developing their subordinates.

Some departments are even worse: certain PMs privately undermine SAs and try their best to curry favor with people in deputy-general-manager positions so they can rise themselves.

Everyone hired as a PM at this company must first work as an SA, because the four founders think you are not qualified enough

(only people who have stayed a long time and those they consider insiders are exempt). As a Tianyancha veteran said, you apply for position A, but after joining, you are told to do position B,

and then criticized for supposedly lacking ability.

Although the supervisors are also acting this way as a means of survival, the main reason is that their abilities are extremely inadequate.

Therefore, the highly paid PM position is actually just being a mouthpiece: after passing problems down, PMs leave everything to the SAs and PGs below them to figure out.

Some supervisors even communicate requirements incorrectly and do not know how to allocate manpower or control schedules, resulting in severe rework problems for the team, while the PM is unable to consolidate conclusions for the client.

Project priorities and execution are always shifted onto people below to bear responsibility.

Meanwhile, supervisors only do things that make themselves look good and allow clients or senior internal management to see their achievements (all of which are the result of the team’s efforts),

and then repeatedly PUA the team, saying that internal staff lack ability or do not meet the company’s expectations, using other demeaning language.

Incompetent supervisors are very good at picking on the easy targets. They push all difficult tasks onto subordinates under the pretext of training their abilities,

while the resources provided are merely a pile of unorganized materials.

(However, incompetent supervisors believe they have provided many resources.) They avoid touching anything that would be disadvantageous to themselves or prevent them from showing their abilities, and give clients a long list of excuses to evade responsibility.

Yet their reports to senior internal management describe everything as if they handled it themselves and perfectly controlled the project progress and client communication.

SAs and PGs are also treated like assistants to certain PMs. They must additionally write presentations explaining new or maintenance features until the PM understands them,

or help write issue-resolution documents for reporting to clients. In the end, the PM even puts their own name on documents written by others.

Promotion and salary increases-

Basically, employees who have stayed at this company for 3–5 years have never received a raise. Although the year-end bonuses (apart from the grand prize, which is a phone, the prizes are cash) are fairly generous,

the company actually has good revenue every year but never gives raises. As a result, employees become disappointed and leave after completing 3–5 years.

The promotion system recently proposed by the company’s deputy general manager is, honestly, laughable... It is still neither open nor transparent, and in the end, the final decision is still based on the personal preferences of top management.

(In other words, you have to keep making yourself known to senior management, constantly appear in front of them, or continually show off your performance.)

It is not based on the final score within the company’s purported performance-evaluation criteria. All of this affects the distribution of year-end bonuses.

There was also an SA who rescued a project for an incompetent supervisor, but because the deputy general manager personally helped with coding, the SA was still unfairly penalized.

Even though the incompetent supervisor gave the employee a good performance rating, the employee ultimately received only 0.5 months’ worth of year-end bonus. When asked, the supervisor could only say that it was not their decision (the king of blame-shifting) and then shrug.

There was also a senior PG who was unfairly penalized at the final stage by the department head and ultimately received no year-end bonus.

Things like this are not limited to recent incidents. Performance evaluations are opaque every year and are highly biased and based on personal subjective opinions.

Advice-

If you have just graduated or are from a non-information-related major and want to switch into the field, you could take a look, but staying for a long time offers no benefits.

If you already have a certain amount of work experience, joining will really only mean that the more capable you are, the more work you will be given, without corresponding compensation or recognition.

You will also have to shoulder a lot of responsibility for things you did not cause, making it hard work with little reward.

If you are considering a job with regular working hours and have a family to care for, this could be a good choice if you can tolerate these incompetent supervisors and the company’s individualistic system.