Workplace reviews and discussion: 鴻發國際科技股份有限公司

A retirement home company

1. To put it nicely, this company is hiring a mechanical engineer; to put it bluntly, it is merely looking for a draftsman. The company does not require you to think about anything—just follow the PM’s instructions and complete the work within the deadline.

2. The company’s machines do not require validation. At your company, I spent only nine days developing a new model and completing the 2D/3D designs; as soon as one prototype was finished, it was shipped. Moreover, the head of the PM department is also the company’s vice president. He does not know how to manage projects but likes to micromanage. During development, for example, the hardware department did not know about changes to the coin module, while the software department did not rush to design the machine’s external display UI until right before shipment. There is an obvious lack of cross-functional communication. Most importantly, after rushing to complete a new project, the bonus was only NT$3,000.

3. Machine specifications should be confirmed during development. The machine had already entered mass production with 15 units produced when they suddenly said the IPC needed to be replaced because it was cheaper. I can accept the explanation that the alternative was cheaper, provided that the PM communicated the decision with the relevant departments. Instead, the PM never communicates with anyone and only brings it up when the machine is about to ship. The PM vice president then shirks responsibility by saying that he mentioned it long ago and that everyone else simply was not listening. Because of this, external vendors and internal R&D staff often have to clean up after him.

4. The company has no concept of an approved sample or signed-off specification. The procurement department often switches from Supplier A to Supplier B without notifying anyone. This only becomes known after a problem occurs during machine mass production, and, even more absurdly, mechanical R&D is held responsible whenever something goes wrong. Basically, everything from the eighth-floor production line to the fifth-floor PQC is managed by the procurement manager, who speaks on the phone as if you owed her NT$2.58 million and handles matters emotionally. When R&D needs to modify a mold, it asks procurement whether inventory should be stocked. Procurement always says there is enough, but when the mold actually needs to be modified, it says inventory is insufficient and asks when the modification can be completed. It then relentlessly pressures R&D, which is astounding. Procurement has also never maintained sufficient inventory, so shortages result in long waiting periods. A production management department finally began to counterbalance procurement, but within a few days the procurement manager went to become the production management department’s manager. In other words, she was still in control, so the problems described above continued to occur.

5. As with the incident on June 13, 2025 mentioned above: previously, a design using Lens A was adopted to consume existing inventory. Since the inventory of Lens A has now run out and its MOQ is too high, procurement initiated an ECR to replace it with Lens B. The R&D manager disagreed, but procurement directly issued the materials to the production line and required the mechanical engineer to modify the BOM.

6. The company’s HR department has no real authority and does not know employees’ salaries, because the CEO keeps salary matters tightly under his control. Even an application for mechanical samples costing less than NT$100 must be approved by the CEO. Even when a department manager wants to adjust an employee’s salary, it must go through the CEO. As far as I know, when the R&D manager raised the issue of salary adjustments, it was rejected!

7. Because the company’s HR department cannot find mechanical engineers or testing interns, it often comes up with bizarre ideas, such as giving a non-major document-control employee the title of mechanical engineer or turning a testing intern into a test engineer. The purpose is to attract people who want to be called “engineers” to work here. Such strange ideas are extremely unfair to genuine engineers. People carrying the company’s “engineer” title have widely varying skill levels, which will cause genuinely graduating engineers to have their abilities questioned by companies across the industry!

8. The company’s MIS department is extremely incompetent. Whenever there is a computer problem, they tell you to restart it. If they cannot solve it, they simply reformat and reinstall the computer. Desktop computers are labeled “Internet access prohibited” by MIS; everyone knows why they are prohibited from accessing the Internet. In addition, the desktop specifications are practically antique. The department manager makes it sound good by asking us to list the current computer specifications, but in reality the CEO has no intention of helping engineers upgrade their hardware, and nothing has happened for a long time. On the software side, the company currently uses SolidWorks 2016. The CEO does not want to purchase the software outright, believing that renting it is cheaper, but apparently does not realize that the software upgrade issue remains unresolved to this day.

9. As mentioned above, the version in use is 2016. Strangely, the software used in the Serbia region is a more advanced version, meaning that drawing files exchanged within the same company cannot be used interchangeably. Even the system and part-number conventions follow different standards, making it seem as though the two operations are not part of the same company at all. The Serbia side also occasionally demands that we change to its coding principles, resulting in endless arguments between the two sides, which ultimately remain unresolved.