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

A company that exploits its employees.

1. To put it nicely, this company says it is hiring a mechanical engineer; to put it bluntly, it is merely looking for a draftsman. The company does not need you to think—just follow the PM's instructions and complete the work by 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 drawings, and it was shipped as soon as one prototype was finished. Moreover, the head of the PM department is also the company's vice president. He does not know how to manage projects but loves to interfere. During development, for example, the hardware department did not know that the coin module had been changed, while the software department did not rush to design the external-display UI until right before the machine was shipped. This clearly shows a lack of cross-functional communication. To top it off, the bonus for completing a new project under pressure was only NT$3,000.

3. Machine specifications should be confirmed during development. The company only said it wanted to replace the IPC after 15 machines had already entered mass production, claiming that the replacement was cheaper. I could accept the explanation that it was cheaper, provided that the PM communicated decisions with the relevant departments. Instead, the PM never discusses decisions with anyone and only brings them up when the shipment is about to go out. The PM vice president also shifts the blame, claiming that he had said so long ago and that everyone else simply was not listening. As a result, outside vendors and internal R&D staff are constantly left to clean up his messes.

4. The company has no concept of a sample approval document. The purchasing department often switches from Supplier A to Supplier B without notifying anyone; the issue is not discovered until a problem occurs during mass production. Even more absurdly, mechanical R&D is held responsible whenever something goes wrong. Basically, the purchasing manager oversees everything from the production line on the eighth floor to PQC on the fifth floor. When the purchasing manager calls to ask about something, she acts as though you owe her NT$2.58 million and relies on emotions to get things done. When R&D needs to modify a mold and asks purchasing whether stock should be prepared, purchasing always says there is enough. When the mold actually needs to be modified, they then say inventory is insufficient and demand to know when the modification will be finished, relentlessly hounding R&D and leaving everyone speechless. Purchasing also never maintains sufficient inventory, so shortages lead to long waiting periods. A production-control department finally began to counterbalance the purchasing department, but within a few days the purchasing manager went to become the production-control manager. In other words, she still controls everything, so the problems described above continue to occur.

5. As with the incident on 2025/6/13 mentioned above, a design using Lens A was previously adopted to consume inventory. Since the inventory of Lens A has now run out and its MOQ is too high, purchasing opened an ECR to replace it with Lens B. The R&D manager disagreed, but purchasing directly issued the material to the production line and instructed the mechanical engineer to modify the BOM.

6. The company's HR department has no authority and does not know employees' salaries, because the CEO keeps all salary matters tightly under his control. Even applications for mechanical samples costing less than NT$100 must be approved by the CEO. Even when a department manager wants to approve a salary increase, 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 test part-time workers, it often comes up with bizarre ideas, such as giving a non-major document-control employee the title of mechanical engineer or turning a test part-time worker into a test engineer. The purpose is to attract people who want to be called “engineers” to work there. These strange ideas are extremely unfair to genuine engineers. People with varying levels of ability receive the company's “engineer” title, causing genuinely qualified graduating engineers to have their abilities questioned by companies across the industry.

8. The company's MIS department is extremely disorganized. Whenever there is a computer problem, they tell you to restart the computer; if they cannot solve it, they simply reimage the computer. Desktop computers are labeled by MIS with “Internet Access Prohibited.” Everyone knows why internet access is prohibited. In addition, the desktop computer specifications are antiquated. The department manager politely asks us to list the current computer specifications, but in reality the CEO simply does not want to upgrade the engineers' hardware, and nothing has happened for a long time. The software currently in use is SolidWorks 2016. The CEO does not want to purchase the software outright, believing that renting it is cheaper, but the software update issue still remains unresolved.

9. As mentioned above, the version in use is 2016. Strangely, the Serbia region uses a more advanced version, making it impossible to exchange drawing files within the same company. Even the system and part-number conventions follow different standards, making it seem as though the two sides are not operating as the same company at all. The Serbia team also periodically asks us to change to its coding principles, leading to constant arguments between the two sides, which ultimately go nowhere.