Workplace reviews and discussion: 提威工業股份有限公司

◆ Very close to the MRT station, within a 5-minute walk

◆ The scheduled start time is 9:00 a.m., but everyone arrives at the office around 9:10–9:15. As long as you are not excessively late, it will not be counted as tardiness.

◆ There is afternoon tea every Friday. It is not ordered collectively, so you can choose your own flavor.

◆ Leave half an hour early every Friday (but whether you can actually leave on time depends on your luck^^

◆ Other than the supervisors, all the coworkers are very nice

◆ There is no overtime pay. When things get busy, or when a supervisor assigns an urgent task too late for you to leave, you can only stay behind and do unpaid work.

◆ During the interview, your expected salary will be cut first; it will be cut again during the probationary period. After the probationary period ends, the amount that was originally cut will be added back. A salary increase after one year depends on your luck—it is not a genuine annual raise.

◆ It is a garment OEM factory, but it has not purchased any systems. Checking inventory, looking up historical data, calculating material usage and purchasing materials, preparing quotations... everything is handled with Excel. There is no shared drive either; files are passed back and forth through WeChat. Data is also checked entirely by eye—item numbers, purchase quantities, usage, everything. I recommend organizing a group purchase of lutein with your coworkers.

◆ Adobe and Office are both pirated.

◆ You will not have your own email address. The email accounts are reused from previous employees, so after you leave, the contents of the email account you used will also be visible to the next person.

◆ There is no training whatsoever. You are given a computer filled with the previous employee’s files and expected to teach yourself from them, or figure out your own questions and ask the supervisor. You cannot work according to your own ideas; you have to do things their way.

◆ There is a birthday celebration once a month. Everyone gathers around awkwardly, like paying respects to the deceased, sings “Happy Birthday,” claps, and eats cake.

◆ Where you sit depends on luck. Some monitors are extremely small and have severe ghosting, making it feel like you are working with antiques.

◆ The company has no IT department. If the hardware or software breaks down, you are on your own.

◆ The factory has no production management staff. All the factory’s problems have to be handled remotely: even though you are not on-site, you still have to solve their problems and give them instructions to follow.

◆ The supervisor does not understand clothing, but the factories still have to listen to him. As a result, production lines often stop because he takes forever to make a decision.

◆ The entire company is centralized around one person. Every department and every employee can only listen to the junior supervisor.

◆ While you are on leave, the supervisor will open your computer to receive and reply to your emails. There is absolutely no privacy.

◆ Employees are the only ones who can be wrong; the supervisor is never wrong.

The company is mainly managed by two supervisors—one senior and one junior—who are not professionals in the clothing industry. It is an outsider managing insiders. Basically, everyone reports their work to the junior supervisor, who then discusses it with the senior supervisor.

The senior supervisor does not pay much attention to employees and there is not much interaction, but if you happen to attract his attention, you will be subjected to various forms of PUA. Whether the conversation is positive or negative, it is conducted in a PUA-like manner. His logic when speaking is strange; he seems to have a mental illness and cannot distinguish between speaking harshly and workplace bullying.

The junior supervisor mostly acts based on his emotions. When he is in a good mood, he may explain a task—or teach you only half of it and make you guess the rest. When he is in a bad mood, he tells you to look through the previous employee’s files and figure it out yourself. Whether the problem is at the factory, with a vendor, in shipping, or anywhere else, it will always be the business staff’s fault. He will also interrogate the business staff about why it happened and insist on an explanation—he will not stop until you give him an excuse to hear (if the data is wrong, it is because I didn’t notice it... what other reason could there be...)

Handling documents entirely by hand inevitably creates a risk of errors. The company is unwilling to improve, refuses to buy a system, refuses to reduce the risk of errors, and will not even hire an IT person to write a program.

Overall, the work model is like a group of assistants processing documents for each brand and handing them to an executive assistant, who then consolidates everything for the business staff. The comparison is apt because “everything” has to be reported to the junior supervisor. He then asks the senior supervisor, and we have to wait through layer after layer before receiving the next instruction and continuing. We cannot make our own decisions or handle things ourselves, and cannot even have our own ideas; otherwise, the junior supervisor will scold us. Even when an issue has already been resolved, he will bring it up again to criticize the approach for being different from what he had in mind. It is an extremely inflexible work environment—very suitable for robots.

There is an extremely serious information monopoly between the supervisors and employees. The senior and junior supervisors know most things only because they discuss them among themselves. Employees can only wait for instructions. If there is a misunderstanding or you try to handle something differently, you will be scolded, so you learn absolutely nothing about business work. The supervisors also grovel to customers to beg for orders, so you learn nothing about negotiation or communication skills. However, they are extremely contemptuous toward vendors, demanding unreasonable service from them despite purchasing very small quantities—an absolutely embarrassing attitude.

The factory production lines do not consistently work on the same customer’s products or styles. After finishing a snow jacket for Brand A, they move on to a raincoat for Brand B; the workmanship requirements and methods are different. Every time a new style goes into production, the workers have to adapt all over again, and the same thing happens the following year, so the quality remains terrible and cannot improve.

QC is even worse. There have been cases where supposedly good products reached customers, only for the customer’s QC inspection to find problems in more than half of them: buttons falling off, mismatched leg lengths, excess fabric caught in the stitching of finished products... completely ridiculous.

The supervisors inflate the reported material usage when quoting to customers, while actually purchasing very little material, apparently intending to pocket the difference. However, all of this is done by sending emails to customers and placing orders under employees’ names. Once the customer discovers it, the supervisor steps in to explain that it was the employee’s problem (????

In recent years, the company’s orders have been declining year by year, and it has been unable to recover even in the post-pandemic era. Unless your family is extremely wealthy, or you simply want to experience life as a corporate wage slave, you should not apply or work here. If you want to learn any job skills or have a comfortable retirement-like job, do not expect it.