Workplace reviews and discussion: 活優生物科技股份有限公司

I dreamed it was a shady company headquartered in the United States, located in Neihu.

Flexible working hours; you can go out to buy coffee halfway through the workday and no one will say anything.

There is air conditioning. The factory-office has a single central air-conditioning system, and when production is running, it can get as cold as 12°C.

There is an elevator.

Very close to the bus stop.

The boss is overseas most of the time and occasionally returns to Taiwan.

The chairs are comfortable.

The landlord is very nice.

If you like taking care of people, you can go there—there are many giant babies.

I dreamed it was a shady company headquartered in the United States, located in Neihu.

Dreamer’s quick summary: There are major problems throughout the company, from top to bottom and inside to out. Don’t go!

The dream begins.

Everyone has a different salary structure: some receive a full base salary, while others receive a base salary plus allowances.

Overtime must be applied for in advance, but most applications will not be approved, effectively making it a fixed-responsibility system.

There was once a case where a colleague’s salary was calculated incorrectly, so pay attention. Labor contracts are secretly altered without announcement, with everything decided unilaterally by management. The most outrageous example was that salaries were divided into larger and smaller months; only after a colleague caught it and protested was it secretly added to the labor contract. No labor-management meeting was held afterward either.

There are cases where the position described in the interview does not match the work content after joining. However, it is a startup, so this situation is expected; whether you can accept it is up to each person.

The factory and office are combined, so there is a very rich variety of smells. When frying, the entire company smells of cooking fumes; when making products, there are smoky and spicy aromas. They cling to your clothes, hair, and bags.

The factory is not automated; it is physical labor. Wiring in particular is extremely painful. You have to scrape water off the floor for two hours.

Communication between departments is not smooth. The sales department makes excessive demands, and after R&D produces results based on their requests, sales overturns them, claiming that was not what they said originally. They have urgent orders for the factory every day, making you wonder what the point of holding sales-and-production meetings is. Communication within the sales department is also problematic: they may sell goods that another salesperson was preparing to sell.

The R&D leader does not know what the company’s products are doing (because they go out wandering around during work). Someone can work there for a year and produce only one product that cannot be sold, while pushing all the work onto the R&D staff below them. Their living habits are poor; after experiments or scale-up experiments, they leave everything behind for the factory manager to clean up.

The factory side does not keep production records; they are fabricated before audits. Production control works according to their mood, and when they are in a bad mood, they throw tantrums and things around the production area. The production schedule is of little practical value. Whenever production is about to begin, it is completely deleted and changed because of urgent sales orders. The factory manager is not very useful and only says polite platitudes, blaming the boss for not providing money and not listening to their suggestions. Externally, they claim to come help, but they are not a high-performing employee; when handing out business cards, they give out those of other colleagues at the company.

The people with the least human rights here are the operators, who receive absolutely no respect. They are not allowed to sit during idle time while waiting for work. After working all day on the production line, they may be criticized for slacking off as soon as they sit down to rest. Someone will order operators, in the manner of the boss’s wife, to continue with suddenly added tasks such as packing goods and shipping samples. Even worse, they do not have designated seats and are constantly ordered to move around.

They claim to have flat management, but the sense of hierarchy is severe. The boss is extremely biased toward the sales department, allowing salespeople to use borrowed authority to exploit other colleagues.

The boss says they are open-minded and concerned about workplace safety, but in practice only their own decisions matter. It took more than half a year just to install the factory’s water and electricity systems, which was genuinely dangerous.

The young team and lively atmosphere advertised on the job site are a thing of the past. The benefits also mention a snack cabinet. It does exist—it is empty.

I’ve had too many dreams and might get in trouble, so that’s all for now.

A lot of people have left (a company of around 15 people, established less than five years ago, with at least 15 people having left), and they are currently desperately looking for people...

I woke up; everything above was just a dream of mine. Any resemblance is purely coincidental.