A little compensation
This company is quite friendly toward people from Yilan.
In addition to there being an intercity bus near the company that goes directly to Yilan,
the company is completely understanding about employees who live in Yilan needing to leave work on time.
If you're lucky, your supervisor may even feel sorry for you having to commute every day.
They might even think that you can't afford to rent in Taipei because your salary is too low, which could help you get promoted and receive a raise.
When the pandemic hit, they let you work from home without a second thought. After all, as far as they were concerned, the only dangerous thing was taking the bus between Yilan and Taipei.
If you work a little harder, they may even let you work from home when you're pregnant.
If you live in Yilan and don't receive the treatment described above, you can take a look at what other senior colleagues have done.
You can also refer to other reviews.
Punctual working hours, and the company location is convenient for commuting
The biggest problem with the entire company is the general manager. The funny thing is that everyone in the company knows it—except him.
He has no vision or ability, does not respect expertise, is a petty person who has risen to power, and monopolizes authority. He makes decisions based solely on his personal likes and dislikes and does not use his brain at all.
Ninety percent of employees leave because of the general manager, yet he still thinks he is doing a great job, not realizing that everyone is making fun of him.
He offers salaries arbitrarily and hires employees recklessly, while soliciting investments from a group of shareholders despite having no sales figures at all. Due to a series of incorrect decisions, the products simply cannot be sold. Investors cannot see a future and do not know when an IPO will happen—it is simply the biggest scam in history!
1. Convenient MRT access
2. Get paid just for passing the time
3. Can occasionally work from home
4. Rarely need to work overtime; you can choose between overtime pay and compensatory leave
1. The salary structure is seriously problematic: new hires earn more than existing employees.
2. Salary adjustments depend on the boss’s mood; annual raises are not guaranteed.
3. The company would rather let existing employees resign and spend more to hire someone else, resulting in zero progress while continuing to use the predecessors’ work.
4. Employees who make no contribution still receive their salaries without being dealt with, while those who do the work are made to handle everything.
5. The more you do, the more likely you are to be criticized; taking on more responsibilities is just asking for trouble. Even when your output is several times higher than others’, your salary is barely higher.
6. The company provides no clear direction for its development. It only keeps an eye on R&D progress and never reviews its business and marketing capabilities.
7. It neither properly focuses on developing products nor on helping doctors conduct research. Everyone is confused together, and development has ground to a halt.
8. Useless meetings are called from time to time, and no one knows what they are for. The boss wants to hold one—that alone is the reason, wasting everyone’s time.
9. Internal coordination is poor, so people often push responsibilities onto one another. If you are too easygoing, you will be bullied; you need to know how to refuse and stay out of things.
Conclusion:
Although many startups have some similar problems, this place combines almost every flaw of a small company.
There are too many reasons why talented people cannot stay, resulting in an extremely high turnover rate.
New employees receive incomplete handovers and are unfamiliar with the product, so it takes a long time before they can make any real contribution.
The company is already nearing the end of its startup phase, yet there is still no sign that any of the above problems will be solved or taken seriously.
Punctual working hours, the option to work from home, an office very close to an MRT station, and very little overtime. Suitable for people who prefer stability, do not need to possess many skills or much ambition, seek a peaceful life, or want to earn a salary while looking for another job.
1. Misleading information. During the interview, they said there would be training, but after joining, I found that there was not even a complete product introduction. The employee responsible for guidance had no teaching experience either. Employees' understanding of the company's product functions varied widely, and communication among the engineers was poor, often resulting in twice the effort for half the results. Instead of specializing in one area, they aimed too high and wanted to work in every field, only to end up with nothing worth boasting about. Software that other companies in the same industry have already developed is really not worth wasting time on here (unless you want to take your time experimenting; in that case, this is the place for you).
2. Employing redundant staff. The PM of the AI team does not understand the project and only talks without taking action. When coordination is needed, he merely passes the issue to others instead of helping, then takes credit when results are achieved. Asking him about something can take one or two weeks, or even longer, to get a response, after which he blames team members for not asking someone else themselves. Without understanding medicine, he judges the difficulty of projects based on his own ignorance and then assigns KPI scores arbitrarily. Those who flatter him get high scores, while people who recognize his lack of ability get low scores. The manager also stands by and does not want to deal with matters, so he will not intervene. I suggest that new employees build a favorable relationship with him so that he will like them and give them high scores.
3. No flexibility regarding established KPIs. Even if you fail to meet your KPI because it involves something beyond your control (for example, your progress is blocked because another employee failed to achieve their target), it will still be treated as your problem. The manager says he knows this, but that is how the KPI was set, so there is nothing he can do. (This applies only to the AI team; I do not know about the other teams.)
4. Concerns about the manager's qualifications. The overseas business manager lacks tact in communication and often offends people without realizing it. He does not know how to be humble. If he had strong abilities, people might be willing to trust him, but I suggest that this manager work on his spoken English and self-reflection so that people can respect him.
There are other unbelievable incidents that I will not go into. I believe intelligent people do not need to join before realizing that this is not a place to enter casually: in a company of only around 30 people, approximately one-fifth have left within half a year, and there are constantly job openings on 104. Professionalism will not be respected here; instead, people who slack off are favored by the general manager. Please think carefully before submitting your résumé, and do not be fooled by that small office conference room packed with certificates and awards.
Regarding the responder to the second comment, I assume you are one of the company's managers. You blamed a former employee without knowing the situation in other departments. I suppose you have neither personally "looked into and understood" the matter nor "heard about it," right? The internal disclosure was made because the person had experienced it firsthand and could no longer tolerate it, so they came forward to warn others to choose their company carefully. I suggest that you properly understand the situation within your own company before replying; otherwise, you are merely contradicting yourself and making yourself look laughable.
Leaving work promptly at 5:30 p.m. is the only advantage. There is hardly any work pressure; it’s easy to get by—just pretend to be busy.
The company has no proper systems and is a complete mess. You learn nothing and cannot build up any experience. There is no spirit of teamwork. On the surface, there are designated substitutes, but in reality, when you take leave, no one will help you even with simple tasks, and they will even make snide remarks behind the backs of those who take leave. You cannot see a future working here; it is a complete waste of time and adds nothing to your résumé. The only reason to include this job experience is to avoid having a gap on your résumé.
Stable working hours with very little overtime.
There isn’t much to do, but you have to know how to look busy.
The company’s products have potential for growth; it’s just that the company is poorly managed.
1. The company’s office environment is terrible. There are fewer than 30 employees, divided among three offices in total. Two of the offices are in the same building, on the 11th and 6th floors. They are essentially residential spaces converted into offices—small and run-down.
2. The head of the company’s business unit is responsible for overseas sales, but their English proficiency is astonishingly poor. They often fail to understand the situation, and what they say frequently leaves people speechless. They are nothing like a salesperson. They also love to overinterpret the boss’s intentions and then relay them to everyone as if they understood the boss perfectly—essentially acting as the boss’s spokesperson.
3. The team responsible for AI development seems to have no idea what it is doing! The PM does not coordinate or communicate at all, and the required project progress never materializes! The KPI indicators for subordinate employees are absurd: responsibilities outside their job scope are also included in their KPI criteria! The manager does absolutely no management either!
4. The company is extremely obsessed with educational qualifications and whether someone has studied abroad. Within the same team, people doing the same work can have salaries differing by more than double.
5. The general manager loves interfering in the affairs of every department, despite not understanding business development at all. They require field sales staff to sit in the office three days a week and require sales employees to take the MRT when going out. When employees resign, they deliberately make things difficult for them, and they frequently threaten not to pay salaries if the handover is deemed insufficient. Many departing employees have suffered as a result! Even if you report them, they cannot really be penalized; at most, you can recover what you are owed. So they are not afraid at all—truly appalling!
A small company with fewer than 30 employees can have one-third of its staff resign within a single year because there are simply too many outrageous incidents to describe one by one. In short, if you value your career development and reputation, do not go there.
Punctual working hours.
Lunch is half an hour, but the timing is not very strict.
You can leave work at 5:30.
However, I still recommend that if you can join a large company, you should avoid working for a small company.
Especially if you have a background from one of the top companies, I really don't recommend wasting your time here.
There are only a little over 20 people in the company, and as much as a quarter of them (or even more) may leave within a year.
I stayed for three years, and except for the manager, almost the entire R&D team was replaced.
The people mainly responsible for developing the company's two major products have also all left; the remaining employees are responsible for maintenance.
There is a mixed-race prince at the company. Coincidentally, over these three years, any employee whose ancestry was more “pure” than his was disliked by him.
I also do not recommend that female employees work under him (unless you can say “Wow, you're so amazing!” at every opportunity).
He disliked most of the women in the company (the unequal treatment was obvious; I heard him muttering about them many times in the office).
As long as he disliked you, he could even secretly curse you in the office for everyone to hear when you took bereavement leave.
If you fell from an office chair onto the floor, he would not give you even the slightest bit of attention (even your coworkers would only dare to message you privately on LINE to check on you).
But if he liked you, even if you dropped an unopened cup of instant noodles on the floor, he would make a special trip over to check whether the noodles had injured you.
Based on my experience, don't place too much faith in salary adjustments, bonuses, trips, or company dinners.
There were no salary adjustments from April 2020 through September 2021.
Bonuses also depend on whether your manager likes you (same work, different pay; if they don't like you, even doing more work will not earn you more compensation).
There has only been one company trip.
Company dinners depend on which team you are in. The AI team had them, but there were none for people under the mixed-race prince (January–September 2021).
Company dinners usually only took place when someone who had been there for a long time resigned, in order to appease the staff.