[This depends on which team you join; the following experience is from the Hong Kong-based team directly responsible for both the JavaScript-based frontend and backend.]
The company is very willing to hire career changers, and the interview is not difficult. There is a pre-employment test, which I remember consisted of multiple-choice questions. There is only one interview, with the direct supervisor, who is a very nice person. The interview covers questions they consistently care about, such as explaining your previous work, frontend security-related issues, and performance issues.
1. The team reports directly to Hong Kong, but its benefits and policies are Taiwanese, and a female supervisor in Taiwan can also influence matters such as whether employees may work remotely. The Taiwan office has many uncomfortable rules, including email formats and paperwork for leave and overtime. Overtime must be applied for before 4:30 p.m. on the same day, but in practice QA will suddenly say before the end of the workday that a test has failed, or a Hong Kong senior will say that something must be completed. Taiwanese colleagues often work overtime without anyone saying anything because they do not want to make an issue of it. Although the company has flexible working hours from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m., you are told by the female supervisor that matters must be handled before 9:00 a.m., or you will receive demerit points. You also have to buy drinks for the office at 5:00 p.m. (effectively a fine).
2. There is a huge difference between Hong Kong and Taiwanese work cultures. Hong Kong employees work until midnight or on weekends, possibly because they are paid appropriately, which causes the team to cater to Hong Kong preferences. For example, some people barely work during the day and then commit at 10 p.m. to create the impression that they worked very late. Hong Kong colleagues do not find this uncomfortable; instead, they wonder why Taiwanese employees do not work overtime.
3. The direct supervisor, a Hong Kong tech lead, is a very good person. He gives newcomers appropriate workloads and enough time, but he is extremely busy. You have to proactively ask him for code reviews; otherwise, his schedule is full and he works overtime until very late, making it easy for junior employees to coast.
4. Project management is very problematic. We are a vendor, and the PM in the middle is the Taiwanese chairman. The management process changed from having a junior PM sync the client's Jira into our own Jira, to having us added directly to the client's Jira. No one filters the requirements. The Figma design that the client initially approved eventually became merely a reference; everything is changed according to the client's tickets. One moment something is made 25% larger, and the next they say it is too large and that it should be based on how it “feels.” Everyone has a different sense of what feels right, so the same page was modified many times. Even though we use the client's Jira, no one filters out todos or confirms requirements. It is simply “do whatever is under a certain parent.” The junior PM Ryan left after three months, and another junior PM resigned after one month. No one assigned frontend tickets to the sprint for a period of time, and then a few weeks later management became angry and asked why none of the tickets had been done. If they were not assigned to the sprint, why were we expected to do them?
5. The company has no year-end bonus, only bonuses, but no one on our team has received one because the team is supposedly newly established.
6. The supervisor above the direct manager seems to be a PM for another project. Sometimes they are present and sometimes not, and they drop in whenever they think of something, creating multiple Excel files and a confusing chain of command. The team was never fully assembled. At one point, the designer was expected to act as PM, and later junior developers had to share PM duties.
7. This project was not properly planned in advance at all. The team consisted of career changers with one year of experience, and there was no senior person assigning smaller tasks. It felt like being in a career-change course and writing code independently. At first, the standard was simply that it had to work; once the features became more complex, the Hong Kong seniors still had to spend time refactoring the code.
8. The senior manager in Hong Kong values hierarchical reporting. The junior manager in Taiwan is not Taiwanese; he is a decent person by nature, but I was undermined by him several times. He is a good person, but his initial understanding is easily mistaken and his reactions are excessive, and he is the only point of contact. Early on, he strongly helped promote a remote-work culture within the team. Later, however, he said he would not help raise concerns about noise or other matters if he had not personally noticed them, although he would not stop others from raising them. What he cared about most was low salaries or the lack of bonuses. After I had already submitted my resignation, he went to the senior manager and said that I was leaving because there was no bonus, which caused me to be completely blacklisted; the senior manager also showed no intention of trying to retain me. Later, because I was supposed to provide handover files on my second-to-last day, he apparently misunderstood this as me slacking off. But providing a handover progress sheet on the second-to-last day is universally understood to be normal. This shows that the company simply does not care. I could have waited until 5:30 p.m. on my last day to give them anything; if no one asked, it would not have been my concern. He then began imagining that I had refused to handle a ticket that was no longer assigned to me, reported it to the senior manager, and discussed it with everyone in the office. In reality, I had privately messaged the Hong Kong senior manager, who left me on read—or rather, did not read or reply—until my company account was disabled. To be honest, this company simply wants inexpensive Taiwanese employees to perform repetitive work such as UI tasks and translation. They only want to take the minimum steps necessary to retain people. Career changers looking for a stepping stone can come experience Hong Kong’s servile work culture and ethics, as well as the Taiwan office’s rules and the team leader’s double standards. We were simply too nice and did not want to fall out with them. Later, the team leader even went on a one-week business trip to Hong Kong with flights and accommodation fully paid. Think carefully about whether you want to join, because this intermediary may distort the facts.