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1. The work environment is bureaucratic; leaving on time is described as a lack of initiative, and increased workloads come with unpaid overtime.
2. Employees they take a dislike to are immediately labeled as having a “bad attitude” or being “undisciplined.”
3. They are friendly during interviews, but immediately start using psychological manipulation after you join. Those at team-leader level and above really love to put on airs.
4. The benefits are all empty promises, with a pile of non-work-related probationary-period assessment reports, book reflections, and online courses. The salary is completely disproportionate to the demands.
The salary and benefits are terrible; don't waste your energy getting your hopes up.
A consistently consistent company—I interviewed there several years ago, and it's still just as terrible as ever.
I never applied to this company; HR proactively sent me an interview invitation.
After I accepted the invitation, they immediately emailed me links to the company's resume submission system and an assessment on a job bank website.
Twenty minutes later, this idiot from HR sent the following message through the job bank:
Hello,
Thank you for your interest in and application for this position. After careful consideration, we currently have other candidates who are being prioritized, so we will be unable to proceed with arranging an interview for you this time. We hope you understand.
Thank you very much for your trust and patience. We sincerely wish you every success in your future career development. Should a suitable opportunity arise, we will contact you as a priority.
Thank you, and once again, we wish you all the best!
What a laughably absurd company.
First, I should mention that I’m a full-time outsourced employee who is stationed here every day.
The advantages are that there is internet access. At first, the outsourced workspace was very small and cramped, and almost all the chairs were broken. Later, perhaps because Trade-Van had to write a sustainability report, they moved the outsourced vendors to another, larger office area. There were quite a lot of cockroaches in the early period... By the middle period, cockroaches were less common.
The restrooms are shared with other companies. Although there are cleaning staff, they still get dirty quite easily. There are always people with terrible manners who wash their meal containers in the restroom and leave food scraps everywhere...
There is a Herjung-brand water dispenser, a convenience rack from The Welcome, and coin-operated beverage machines, so it’s quite convenient to buy things.
The supervisor understands plain language and is willing to communicate, which is a little better than many SI companies.
They can provide vendors with DB and VM access, so you don’t have to handle the process for them yourself. This is much, much better than LANcom.
The pay is low, so the work is relatively low-level. The supervisor doesn’t really trust outsourced personnel, so your hands are tied when doing things.
If there isn’t any particular experience you want to gain, I don’t think you should spend your energy at an SI company. Kindness goes unrewarded, and it’s really not worth it.
Since these are government projects, the tolerance for errors is relatively high, which is also one of the advantages.
Only consider coming if the salary is adequate or the commute is short; otherwise, I don’t recommend this company.
The space is shared with many other companies—not just the companies in the outsourced area.
Being one minute late results in one hour’s pay being deducted (in violation of the Labor Standards Act), and there are no flexible working hours.
The projects I encountered used outdated technology, and they kept refusing to hire more people.
The scheduling was extremely poor, and they would ask you to come in and work overtime on Saturdays and Sundays.
They would make major changes to the functionality on the day before launch or even an hour before launch, then question afterward whether you had actually checked everything.
If you take three hours off in the morning and start work at 1:00 p.m., they will deduct one hour’s pay from you, claiming that the lunch break is from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
However, if you leave at noon for lunch and return at 2:00 p.m., they won’t deduct any pay. Going downstairs to smoke for half an hour also won’t result in a deduction :)
They nickel-and-dime you over your hourly pay while still making you bear the responsibility, even though the pay is so low... Consider it a charitable act that they haven’t been reported to the labor authorities. This company is excessively exploitative. I hope this can help job seekers avoid some pitfalls :)
During my time working at this organization, I gained a deep understanding of how demanding the work can be. Since the company’s main business is taking on projects from government agencies, it must follow their regulations. If a government agency does not have a thorough understanding of its own business, the organizations undertaking these projects are often the ones that suffer the most. In addition, the many different circumstances involving outsourced partners require people to respond with even greater caution.
Regarding hardware, I learned from my superiors that it could not receive the attention and proper handling it deserved. As the number of projects continues to increase, staffing decisions made in the name of meeting annual targets focus only on cost rather than actual needs. This makes one wonder whether it is worth continuing to work here.
Some department managers only pay lip service to valuing team opinions. However, even after opinions are raised, no improvements have been seen after a year, while frontline employees are still required to meet performance targets every year. As for salary, although I received documentation, I still recommend that everyone spend extra time reviewing it independently. In addition, contracts should only be signed after careful consideration. It is important to note that some managers include meal allowances as part of the salary, so special attention should be paid during salary negotiations to avoid misunderstandings.
Regarding confirmation of the resignation date, Article 15, Paragraph 2 of the Labor Standards Act stipulates: “For an indefinite-term contract, when a worker terminates the contract, the notice period prescribed in Paragraph 1 of Article 16 shall apply mutatis mutandis.” Some former employees have said that they were taken by the administrative department to negotiate the matter. It is recommended that individuals decide for themselves whether to follow the regulations mentioned above.
In summary, if you want to strengthen your résumé, staying here for one or two years may be worthwhile. If you hope to develop your career here long term, you should be mentally prepared to handle large volumes of data-related work—even engineers are no exception—and it is best to have the ability to take on projects. If you are considering advancing within the company, careful consideration is advised.
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Average work pressure
The on-site unit manager clearly knows that several colleagues lack the necessary abilities. Lin, Tsai, and Chen all paste the company's code into GPT to do their work, yet the manager does not stop them and still gives them KPIs, violating company regulations.
Whenever there is a people-related issue, the manager simply refuses to deal with it, causing some talented employees to leave.
To boost performance, the manager disregards team quality and likes to make grand promises.
It is obvious that some people fabricate their end-of-term reports, but the manager does not care—after all, they are only for show to senior management. Some outcomes are even predetermined and provide no actual benefit to everyone.
The manager always says that everyone is treated fairly, but in reality only nurtures a few people—Chou, Liu, Chang, Lin, and Chen—to build their own team.
The manager often says that people with only this level of ability need to work harder, but in practice provides no opportunities for them to gain experience, leaving them able to do nothing but imagine and think until their systems break down.
The manager thinks they have a good relationship with their subordinates and wants to outperform the previous supervisor, but in fact everyone can sense the lack of sincerity.
It is very obvious that the manager gives people the cold shoulder, whether in work assignments or seating arrangements.
After the manager changed, the entire department became even more fragmented. People without the necessary abilities are allowed to stay, while capable employees are driven to resign.
If this is how the company treats prospective employees, at least you won’t have to wait until after joining to discover that you’ve jumped into a pit of fire.
A terrible first impression. In the very first email, HR simply sent a psychological test and a personal information form to fill out, without explaining at all: 1. who the company is and what it does; 2. which position it is recruiting for; or 3. what qualifications the position requires. I was given half an hour to complete it, and HR called promptly half an hour later to question why it wasn’t finished. When asked the three questions above, I couldn’t answer a single one. HR was still very surprised when I said I had no idea who they were. Has HR never conducted recruitment before?
Free lunch provided
Some employee benefits expenses can be claimed
The company is stable, with investment from the Ministry of Finance and no issues with its revenue sources
Trade-Van is actually suitable for people who do not want change. If you consider yourself a good executor, seek stability, and can accept the lack of freedom and piles of paperwork typical of Taiwanese companies, then you can join.
If not, you will be extremely miserable
The benefits are passable—fairly average.
Lunch is provided.
With a state-owned background, power struggles are severe. If the government changes hands, you may soon face a major purge and reckoning.
Those who rise to prominence this year may be humiliated into resigning or told to get out the next year.
Advancement has absolutely nothing to do with ability; it depends on intrigue and connections.
A certain manager is extremely poor: an authoritarian bully who is excellent at managing upward but a complete disaster at managing downward.
The entire department is propped up by a group of unremovable, servile yes-men with an indomitable slave mentality, yet they think they are truly far-sighted, unparalleled talents.
They apply double standards to everything: putting on a show for other departments, flattering senior executives, and bullying and humiliating their own subordinates in every possible way.
They demand professionalism and strictness from others while indulging themselves.
If you want to experience palace intrigue in the front-row live-rock-zone, this company is a decent choice.
In any case, you can slack off to your heart’s content: at Trade-Van, you’ll work yourself to death if you do your job, while slacking off feels fantastic.
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As a manager, you claim to know everything, yet you can't design a good interview process and even criticize the interviewees—is that too arrogant?
The interview went pretty well.
The interviewers were all quite nice.
They call to tell you that you got an offer and ask whether you're interested, but in reality, you're just a backup candidate.
They'll ask you to wait for the approval documents to be signed first.
They call every week to say that the approval documents still haven't come through. It feels like they're being very proactive, but they say the same thing for three weeks straight, hahaha.
Once they find someone they like better, they tell you that, unfortunately, things don't look optimistic.
They waste a month of your time and then never follow up.
Poor administrative efficiency.
The salary and benefits are good.
The manager said that only members of the core team could be prioritized for an excellent performance rating. The way core team members were selected was by sending messages in the early hours of the morning and choosing whoever responded fastest as a core team member. But some managers cannot reach anyone once they have clocked off.
The manager said that condensing code into one or two lines is very bad because other people cannot understand it; writing ten lines makes it understandable to others and reduces their burden.
When there are staff shortages, no one is hired to fill the vacancies, and colleagues are simply asked to help more. Working more than 30 hours of overtime per month is still considered normal by the manager.
It is suggested that the Labor Bureau investigate the working hours.
1. The engineers and team members are relatively young (almost all are recent graduates or interns, because the company mainly recruits people who have just graduated or have no experience with information technology projects)
2. There is a free coffee machine, annual health checkups, and free lunch
3. The company offers a combined subsidy of NT$3,000, which can be used for travel or training
4. You receive seven days of paid sick leave per year from your first day of employment
A. A “happy company” that claims to have government-affiliated backing, but what about the employee benefits and work environment?
－ Each developer is provided with a laptop, but the screen is small and painfully slow. Applying for an external monitor requires repeated reminders before anything gets done.
The equipment provided by headquarters is among the most outrageous I’ve seen: one traditional 17-inch LCD monitor per person.
－ The chair legs are unstable, so while coding you also have to worry about whether you might be thrown to the floor one day.
－ There is a snack cabinet, but you have to pay to eat anything (supposedly employee benefits at half price; items that have been offered during the Ghost Festival get an extra discount).
－ Job listings on 104 mention things like massage chairs and employee-benefit courses, but none of these are available outside headquarters.
－ The old office has been overcrowded for a long time, and there are not enough restrooms. At the beginning of the year, the senior boss grandly announced that they would move, but by the end of the year there was still no sign of it (I heard the boss thought the new office was too expensive... and that was the end of the matter).
－ There is no dedicated administrative staff, so miscellaneous tasks are assigned to whoever seems easiest to dump them on.
B. Poor office efficiency and highly bureaucratic internal communication
－ The development environment is incredibly noisy. Business development staff all work in the same room, so you constantly hear them talking on the phone. Sometimes senior employees even use LINE with speakerphone on during calls.
－ There is no dedicated person answering the office switchboard. The unwritten rule is that new employees help answer the phone. Often the calls are for customer service, sales, or system issues, making things extremely chaotic. When the Taipei headquarters cannot be reached by phone, people Google the Taichung office number and randomly call that instead. The company website refuses to publish a customer-service number, because whenever major systems such as 1922 or the five-times stimulus vouchers go live, the office phone lines become completely overwhelmed.
－ They love using LINE as an internal communication tool. The company has actually purchased Teams, but accommodates a group of older managers simply because they are “used to it.” As a result, you get pulled into a huge number of project groups for sales and PM-related work. In other words, receiving private messages or @ mentions from managers and clients after work or while on vacation is an everyday occurrence.
－ You also have to fill out a work log every day. If you fail to do so several times, your opportunities for annual promotion will be deducted.
－ The company’s internal processes have a strong bureaucratic atmosphere. Administrative efficiency is poor and traditional, and there are more rules than in a government agency.
C. Development processes and training???
- The roles of PM, SA, RD, and QA are unclear. Because there are too many projects, you may simultaneously be the PM, SA, and RD for different projects. By the way, there is no dedicated QA.
－ PMs are extremely inexperienced. Schedule planning is unbelievably poor, and development timelines are compressed every single time. Sudden, meteorite-like requirements often arrive, deadlines are casually announced and made extremely tight, and only after delivery do they say “balabala”; then the project is put on hold for several months before finally going live.
－ Documentation is provided only when they feel like it. Sometimes you are told to start work without any documentation, and only after you finish do they take it to the client to ask whether it is acceptable.
－ Training is incomplete. A manager says one sentence and dumps the task on you, leaving the RDs to figure everything out through telepathy.
－ You are often assigned to support projects at the Taipei headquarters. In particular, over the past few years, several major government projects have frequently required people to rotate in and out.
－ This was the first time I saw Git being used while SVN was still used for version control. Truly eye-opening.
D. Authoritarian and traditional management style, with no room for dialogue between labor and management
- Business orientation >>> technical quality and ability. As an RD, writing good code is not essential; instead, you need to know how to create presentations that managers can understand. (By the way, don’t include too much technical detail—the older people won’t understand it.)
－ Whether overtime is approved depends on the manager’s mood. Whether you are allowed to claim overtime is also up to them. If there is no budget, just swallow it and work a little more; the company calls this a demonstration of teamwork. By the way, if a manager @mentions you on LINE during a holiday to write a report, or asks you to cooperate with an online system operation on a holiday, the unwritten rule is that you (yourself) cannot claim overtime. The manager says this demonstrates team cooperation and rapport.
－ Officially, you can choose between overtime pay and compensatory leave, but there is no budget... The unwritten rule is to choose compensatory leave (yourself).
－ If you have a problem or suggestion and want to raise it, you cannot speak honestly. As soon as you refuse to comply or make a suggestion that does not suit the manager’s mood, you may be threatened with being fired, or your promotion and probation period may be suppressed under some fabricated pretext.
1. You can become proficient in the finer points of office politics.
2. The work is KPI-driven, and you can become skilled at heavy documentation writing.
3. Many documents are written by engineers, including requirements analysis, system analysis, testing, backup plans, operation manuals, and so on. There are plenty of opportunities to practice and improve your Chinese and English typing speed.
4. The technologies used are relatively old. GIT was only introduced in 2020; before that, it was SVN or TFS. You do not need to worry about being made obsolete for knowing only outdated technologies.
5. There is an AED in the office. If you unfortunately collapse at your desk, at least there is an AED that might save you.
6. The company’s political and business connections appear to be managed fairly well; at least they somehow managed to cancel the direct customs connection.
Equipment-wise: you are provided with a 13-inch i5 laptop (2c4t), 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and an SSD. You can practice developing programs with very limited resources. I timed it once: during development, compilation alone took about an hour and a half per day, which can make the workday last longer.
The provided computer is very slow, which lets you practice using Git commands and writing programs with Notepad and the command line.
1. The provided computer is quite unsuitable for engineers: it is very slow and the screen is too small. Many people bring their own computer or monitor, upgrade the memory themselves, or bring their own keyboard and mouse.
2. There is a lack of trust and teamwork among colleagues, and the infighting is quite serious. People may even withhold key documents to lower your KPI score.
3. The managers’ management style is relatively high-pressure and controlling. The constant meetings and close monitoring of progress through demos create a general sense of insecurity.
4. There is a lot of meaningless quality-assurance work. QA focuses on the completeness of documentation rather than improving product reliability. Every project is afraid that QA will add more audit items, because that means a large amount of additional documentation and procedural work.
5. Regarding career advancement, the department keeps trying to promote engineers into PMs. However, the skills required for the two roles are different, so you end up seeing good engineers become bad PMs and bad engineers.
6. Of course, becoming a PM has its advantages. Besides receiving a higher performance rating, PMs also have a say in how project-completion bonuses are distributed. For most team members, though, it is something they can see but not actually benefit from.
7. Colleagues monitor one another, such as timing how many minutes you are away from your seat. Managers will kindly remind you how long you have been away, while also reminding you that “everyone is watching.” Although the company has stress-relief facilities, such as individual karaoke rooms, I think they are mainly there to satisfy the criteria for being a “happy enterprise.”
8. Since colleagues monitor one another, it is probably best not to say anything. Even positive thoughts can be twisted into something negative and reported to managers out of context.
9. Managers openly state that failure to cooperate will directly lower your KPI score, which effectively means cutting your year-end bonus.
10. The company’s management focuses only on performance and costs, with no vision.
11. There is a strange innovation competition every year. Apart from 2020, when it was not held because of the pandemic, it has taken place roughly every year. This is not the kind of competition where you actually create a minimum viable innovative product and demo a prototype. Based on my experience as a winner, I personally think it is more like a presentation-proposal competition. The company does not seem to invest money to incubate new products; beyond holding the competition and providing a small amount of prize money, it also sets winning the competition as a KPI.
12. The manager’s manager—the department manager—also comes to work on holidays and takes photos of the people who show up. If you want to curry favor with your superiors, volunteering to work unpaid on holidays is a good choice.
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The company has various disgusting tactics; I’ll briefly list a few.
1. When you join, HR and your senior supervisor will repeatedly emphasize that the company is a happy workplace and that the year-end bonus will be four months’ salary, but they simply won’t put it in the employment contract.
2. They promise a NT$3,000 salary increase after the probationary period, but won’t put it in the employment contract. Once the probationary period ends, they apply for the chairman’s approval of the raise. The process takes two months, and in the end they tell you the raise wasn’t approved.
3. They tell you the company doesn’t require overtime, and that you’ll receive overtime pay if you do work overtime. But after joining, if you leave work before 8 p.m., you cannot apply for overtime pay. Even if you apply, they’ll tell you that your overtime records will affect your performance evaluation and ask whether you’re sure you want to apply.
4. Senior executives decide which technical solutions to use for development, but won’t tell you where or how they are supposed to be used. You can only figure out how to incorporate them yourself. I even suspect they received kickbacks from vendors.
5. The employment separation certificate is not provided until nearly a month and a half after the official departure date.
6. The job title on the offer and in the company’s internal system is “Senior Engineer,” but the title on the employment separation certificate becomes “Associate Software Engineer.”
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At the beginning, they promised that my salary would be increased by 3,000 after the probationary period.
Once the probationary period was actually over, they simply acted as if it had never been mentioned.
A company that can only recruit people through deception like this
has a bad reputation in the industry for a reason.
The turnover is so high that several people have left within just a few months,
yet they still lament that it is hard to find people.
They should think about what their own company has done.
It seems they can only deceive naive, inexperienced fresh graduates.
Anyone with even a little ability would not want to join this company.
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This kind of terrible company actually has the nerve to keep calling itself a happy workplace.
Thick-skinned beyond belief, they can make black sound white.
I must have been blind to join your company in the first place.
Provides an unappetizing boxed lunch at noon, which saves money
Likes to ask employees to do unpaid favors. Flexible start time from 8 to 9 a.m., but clocking out before 8 p.m. means you cannot apply for overtime pay. You also have to report it in advance and obtain your supervisor's approval.
The development schedule is extremely tight, the processes are a complete mess, and the requirements are different in the morning and afternoon.
The development direction may change drastically. Supervisors will tell you that this is normal and that you need to get used to it, but the schedule remains unchanged.
The development schedule is unreasonable, and you are pressured to commit to a completion date. If it is not finished by the deadline, you have to finish it even if you have to sleep at the company, while overtime can still only be reported as 4 hours.
When your salary is due for adjustment after the probationary period, they will deliberately delay it. It gets held up with the chairman and general manager for two months, and they simply do not adjust your salary, even though the entire onboarding process only takes 7 days.
There are countless rules and procedures, and the company is bureaucratic. When things succeed, supervisors take the credit; their subordinates bear the responsibility.
The bonuses/company year-end party are pretty good
You get a lot of leave when you resign, so you can take a great break
Skinny people will definitely come out fat after joining
Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy
They keep emphasizing “accountability,” but whenever something goes wrong, the rookies are the ones who bear the brunt
Because the veterans’ responsibility is to pin the blame on the rookies
Choose the wrong department and it’s hell; choose the right department and you still won’t get to heaven
Bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy
There are positions in Nangang District and in Datong District. Since it is a government organization, it complies more closely with the Labor Standards Act, but seasonal periods require overtime.
It has a strong bureaucratic atmosphere.
From raising you to the end of your life, they’ll even get you to join in and believe in Buddhism in a weird way XD
The religion forcefully pressures people to believe; if you don’t, they make excuses and fire you for being “abnormal”.... Even HR believes in that religion.
The more senior colleagues have good technical skills, so there is a lot to learn from them.
There is a strong bureaucratic atmosphere, and if you do not negotiate your salary well at the beginning, it is difficult to get a raise.
Get into a good department and you’ll be in heaven; get into a bad department and you’ll be living in a suite. Salary is determined entirely by seniority, not ability, so there are cases of equal pay for different work. It’s recommended to build up a certain amount of experience elsewhere and negotiate a good salary before joining, which will be far better than entering as a fresh graduate and slowly working your way up.