Pinkoi_香港商果翼科技股份有限公司台灣分公司

They have various kinds of interview questions, it’s a good chance to validate your skill diversity.

However Pinkoi is still the worst interview I took in this 3 years.

1. Interviewers are like question machines, they act like they have no intention of interacting with you but just need you provide the answers they want to hear, especially for the female interviewer. They said Pinkoi is an open minded and love to communicate company while I don’t feel so during the meeting.

2. “Rate your interview out of 10 and the reason” from HR right after the technical interview. I am not sure what does the HR expect to hear but it’s a suck question to me. Is that a template from some HR interview books? If it is, please stop asking that.

The interview was overly simple.

It consisted entirely of questions from past interviews. The whiteboard question asked how to remove duplicate values from an array.

They had reviewed the candidate's résumé.

They claimed that fully remote work could be requested, but working hours had to be coordinated.

1. HR had absolutely no idea what kind of person they wanted to recruit.

When I asked what abilities they expected in a candidate, she replied that the candidate needed to pass the interview threshold. I followed up by asking whether they preferred someone more experienced or whether a newcomer would be acceptable. She replied that, as long as the candidate could pass the threshold, more experience was of course better.

That made me curious: does Pinkoi really have no budget ceiling for hiring?

2. Since there was supposedly no budget ceiling, I accepted the invitation to interview. The entire interview turned out to feel like merely going through the motions from beginning to end.

The interviewers did not follow up on any questions. Regardless of whether the candidate's answers were good or bad, the engineers simply moved directly to the next question without reacting.

The questions had no depth either. They were basically the kinds of questions you would get by asking ChatGPT what frontend interview questions to ask and listing them out.

Either the engineers at this company are only capable of this much, or they really only want to hire disposable junior employees.

But if the latter is true, then it is clear that HR was lying.

3. The whiteboard question prohibited the use of Map and Set. Although that is not in itself a problem, I cannot understand how this helps them assess the interviewee's ability, or why it had to be tested in an interview. Do they have internal development restrictions that prohibit using Map and Set?

After I solved it instantly, the engineers were stunned. They had absolutely no idea why that solution was correct. They stammered and muttered to themselves for half a day—longer than it took me to write the solution—before finally moving on to the next question. It was obvious that they did not want to admit they did not understand it, nor did they want to ask.

Their abilities and approach to collaboration are deeply concerning.

4. Throughout the interview, the engineers refused to disclose anything about the internal situation. At most, they only mentioned what departments there were.

It was not until one of them let something slip and mentioned that they had no QA and no project manager, and that everyone had to handle everything themselves, including planning, testing, and taking the blame.

5. After HR took over at the end, she began asking strange questions such as how many points I would give the interview overall and how many points I would give myself. She also asked why I wanted to interview even though she herself had invited me.

It was clear that, like the engineers earlier, she was simply reading questions from a script.

When she finally asked about my salary expectations, I gave the median of the salary range they had posted on 104, but she immediately said it was too high and asked why I wanted that amount.

Although the overall impression was already so poor that no one would want to join, they were still unwilling to spend money while trying to poach someone. I truly do not understand why they wanted to waste everyone's time.

It was also very clear that Pinkoi's HR was deceiving people. They apparently wanted to hire junior engineers at low salaries, yet posted a salary range on the job site with an almost twofold spread between the lower and upper limits, then lured candidates into interviews with the misleading claim that the greater their ability and experience, the better. In the end, they would cut the salary to see whether they could find a capable senior employee willing to work for low pay.

Honestly, a company that tricks people into joining cannot retain talent either. It is easy to see why the engineers responsible for interviewing were so incompetent.

There are problems at every level of management.

I urge newcomers: unless you are completely out of options, do not make the mistake of joining.

- Flat organizational structure, fast communication and decision-making, and transparent company policies

- Leave policies modeled after foreign companies (better than the Labor Standards Act), plus a WFH policy

- No clocking in or out; work is based on responsibility. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage—viewed positively, it offers a high degree of freedom

- The team is relatively young and energetic, with a good working atmosphere. Young people who want to gain “foreign-company-like” and “slightly multinational” work experience can stay, but don’t stay too long—the outside world offers more and better compensation, unless you already have the ability to negotiate a high-level position from the start.

- Located away from the city center, so traffic jams are less of a concern

- The dream is very full, but reality is painfully stark (because average salaries are lower than the market average, if you receive a raise—even just 5–7%—your output will receive special scrutiny. In plain language, the company is petty).

- Extremely unstable; you may be put on a PIP or dismissed because of a manager’s or senior executive’s subjective opinions (using various methods that skirt the edges of the law).

- The team is too young and often makes mistakes, including managers. However, you may not necessarily be dismissed; everything depends solely on the personal whims of managers and senior executives.

- The team limits itself. From top to bottom, there is a strong sense of self-satisfaction; its perspective is very narrow, which consequently affects the development of the entire company.

- The workforce is generally quite young, so there is not much of a generation gap and people are easy to get along with.

- Aside from salary information, everything is very transparent—you can see all the company’s internal financial figures.

- The organization is flat. The E Team’s position is the same as everyone else’s; the CEO might even be sitting right next to you.

- You get 15 days of annual leave as soon as you join.

- Discussions in meetings are rational and focused on the issues.

Overall, the environment is lively, with little bureaucracy or emotional manipulation.

- Because the workforce is generally young, people can sometimes be rather blunt about things, which may come across as sharp.

- Turnover is very high, and employees generally have less than two years of tenure.

- There are many varied tasks. The organization was just restructured at the beginning of the year, so many collaboration processes are still being worked out.

- The ambitions are great, but there is always a shortage of staff.

- The benefits are average, and the compensation and profit-sharing feel very much like those at a traditional Taiwanese company.

- The managers are very young, and sometimes they do not handle things thoroughly enough.

- The deeper cultural foundations can be gauged by looking at a well-known person’s personal Facebook posts. If you can accept them, you are probably a good fit here.

- The company has been established for 11 years and has a stable business model and cash flow, yet it still likes to call itself a startup.

Colleagues are highly capable and help one another. There is no obvious factional infighting.

On the surface, it presents itself as having a Silicon Valley tech company culture, but internally it is actually quite similar to a traditional Taiwanese company. The salary increase and bonus systems are not transparent. Whether there is an annual bonus or benefits depends on the year's revenue (generally, there are none), and may even depend on whether the boss likes you. The company is very good at painting grand visions; after hearing them often enough, you learn to take them with a grain of salt. The managers favored by the boss are usually quite disliked by frontline employees, so it is genuinely unclear why they are managers when other frontline employees clearly have better abilities and higher EQ. In short, this company is absolutely inconsistent with its public image, and its salary levels are also very ordinary. If you work overtime, the boss will question your low efficiency rather than whether the workload is too heavy—and of course, there is no overtime pay; you should be happy if you get compensatory leave.

After learning about the opening on the official website, I sent an email directly to the HR inbox and received an interview email about a week later. The first interview was with HR. I didn't need to fill out an online résumé beforehand or handwrite any forms on-site. During the interview, I could feel Pinkoi's respect for and interest in job applicants because HR took copious notes.

About another week later, there was a second interview with the manager of the department I applied to. Regardless of whether I was ultimately hired, I received notification. HR said which day the result would be available, and the result did arrive that day—they did not go back on their word like some companies do. This was very considerate and meant applicants were not left waiting indefinitely.

After the first interview, I received a small gift—a Pinkoi postcard—as Pinkoi's way of thanking me for applying.

There really weren't any.