泰樂科技軟體有限公司

Similar benefits to those offered by startups

After the interview, I looked into the company and found that it had laid off many engineers not long ago. Product managers also tended to leave after only a short time, which seemed to be related to the management.

The working hours are quite flexible, but it depends on the department! There are plenty of snacks, annual leave, and activities.

The HR manager at our company is quite something: there have been minor salary errors, they act differently in front of and behind people, they don't keep their word, and so on. They simply deny everything and blame it all on others. I suspect they're a Han Kuo-yu supporter...

There are very smart and outstanding colleagues.

Office politics stem from the inflated egos of several young bosses; they are extremely dishonest and untrustworthy.

They make grand promises and force HR to email Glassdoor to remove “inaccurate” negative reviews. They then require foreign colleagues who need work visas to go online and write positive reviews; they use colleagues from back-office departments as personal assistants outside of working hours, handling utilities, rent, and so on 24/7... even though their wives are Taiwanese...

They bully and discriminate against Taiwanese colleagues, saying that Taiwanese people are cheap, and Taiwanese bosses treat employees the same way. They sexually harass female colleagues and use indecent language to describe colleagues. Once a colleague stands up against them, they immediately fire them. They also use English contracts that would not pass under Taiwan’s Labor Standards Act and send colleagues with U.S. law licenses to pressure people into settlements...

Product development is limited, making it impossible to continue developing products with added value; we can only keep optimizing the pages.

A place where you don’t need to waste your time!

None at all. This is a garbage company that you don't even need to show up for an interview with.

The woman conducting the interview was a nasty person. She asked how proficient I was in English. I told her I had graduated from an English department and gave her my TOEIC score, but she actually snickered and said, “What’s that?” She said all our colleagues are foreigners and nobody takes the TOEIC. Being laughed at by someone who can’t even do her own eyebrows properly felt really strange. With HR like this, only a fool would join this company. Is it really such a big deal that the company’s colleagues are all foreigners? The salary isn’t any better, so I have no idea what they’re acting so smug about.

Work

Beware of office politics.

More annual leave than required by the Labor Standards Act, with snacks and coffee provided. They do not skimp on the hardware devices needed for work.

Frontline employees are friendly and willing to share and help one another. Some members of management, however, are very calculating; they do not deserve to have such a friendly group of highly capable employees.

Even though there are foreign colleagues, both the compensation and management style are very much like those of a traditional Taiwanese company.

It is a company run primarily by personal discretion; the systems are just for show. Even when the team exceeds the targets arbitrarily set by management and completes all assigned tasks, if management says your performance is poor, then your performance is poor. They cannot provide any verifiable evidence, the promised profit-sharing turns out to be empty, and their commitments are inconsistent.

Some members of management do not properly fulfill their responsibilities, but they make higher-level managers believe that frontline employees are at fault. They play information-asymmetry games with both sides, pushing responsibility down onto every employee while they only need to make the final decisions.

To ensure that the product could launch on schedule, the development team had engineers draw the process diagrams themselves and write detailed product requirements themselves. Looking back, that was really foolish, because the credit would not go to the engineers. People joining now might not encounter this problem, because several “project assistants” have been hired to do these tasks—and the abilities of these “project assistants” are far better than those of their supervisors.

No matter how trivial the matter, as long as it can serve certain purposes (asserting authority or belittling disliked employees), it can be blown out of proportion. After working there for a while, you can see that one particular PM has extremely poor emotional control; by contrast, their almost obsequious attitude toward senior managers is worlds apart.

Employee turnover is high. For a company of around 60 people, it is normal for about 1–3 employees to leave every two months.

Technologically cutting-edge and passionate about new knowledge. The frontline employees are all very nice.

Promises are repeatedly broken, and deadlines are often missed. More time is spent handling personnel matters than getting things done, which is very disappointing.

None

I applied for a designer position, and the experience was not good. I later found out that they only had a 2.9-star rating on Glassdoor. After taking another look at the reviews, I thought, “Hmm...”

Glassdoor URL:

https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-taroko-software-EI_IE1354038.11,26.htm

I submitted my résumé through 104, and the company quickly sent me a notification the next day saying that I could proceed to the second stage of the application process. The second stage was basically to create a “complete” website prototype and explain the design rationale, as described below. Only three days were provided to complete this stage, and those days were during regular working days.

DESIGN DELIVERABLES

1. Produce a wireframe that demonstrates, in detail, the entire pre and post conversion

funnel. Feel free to add in anything you think will be good.

2. What are the key interactions?

3. Outline the top 5 problems that a user (Prospective customer) can encounter during this

process.

4. What are your solution(s)?

5. Produce a detailed flowchart and sitemap.

6. Anything else you’d like to comment on?

I then worked through the night to finish everything and submitted a proposal presentation (in website-interaction format) before the deadline, along with a prototype website. The text content, layout, animation, and site flow were all complete.

Then I never heard back.

I suggest that the company replace its HR representative (the contact person on 104). The entire process made me feel that they simply wanted to obtain ideas from applicants. At the very least, they should call and interview applicants before asking them to complete an assignment... That is the bare minimum.

The front-end leader has great sense; during the conversation, it was clear that they are very knowledgeable and also supportive of introducing new technologies.

The interview questions weren’t simply collected and revised; instead, they discussed your answers with you in greater depth.

The product is mainly for Europe and the United States, so there are quite a few foreigners. You can get a feel for the international atmosphere.

The office is near an MRT station, which is convenient for MRT commuters, and there are also quite a few relatively inexpensive food stalls nearby.

During the interview, I heard that the company is continuing to expand, so perhaps the office space could be expanded a little as well.

1. The company atmosphere feels quite cheerful, and people leave work on time.

2. The R&D Leader and CTO come across as not only professional but also very attentive to communication and collaboration within the team.

3. The company seems to place considerable importance on job candidates; even when I had to change the interview time at short notice for personal reasons, they did their best to accommodate me.

4. The company has quite a few foreign employees, which is somewhat helpful for broadening one’s international perspective.

1. The company has been hiring more people recently, so the office is a bit crowded.

2. Parking near the company’s location is somewhat expensive.