健和興端子股份有限公司

I’ve been away from this company for a while, but I still feel I should write something to warn others and contribute a little for those who come after me...

First of all, this is actually a pretty good place to build up experience in clerical work. The PM and design roles here are quite relaxed, so if you want to coast later in your career, you could come here too.

The major advantage of applying for these two positions is that, as a PM, you basically only need to chase people up. Once a meeting is sent out, everything becomes the responsibility of product engineering (including following up on materials and schedules). You can stay busy at your desk all day without needing to move around much. For design, you just need to draw; if you draw something incorrectly, just keep submitting design changes. In any case, design changes are also handed off to product engineering rather than being handled by yourself (it’s quite absurd). It’s a classic traditional manufacturing company—in short, just pass the work on to someone else. I’ll add the disadvantages below.

The biggest problem at this company is the lack of clearly defined responsibilities. Even hiring more people has failed to solve this problem. If you apply for product engineering here, unfortunately, you won’t learn anything—you’re just a highly paid operator. I’ll explain why below:

1. Manpower allocation issues (unclear division of responsibilities)

First of all, this company has no process engineers and no test engineers either (besides recruiting people, shouldn’t they also create new positions?).

Everything is concentrated under product engineering. Testing samples and making samples are all handed to product engineering... You can imagine how serious the problems are...

2. The case-closing process is too complicated (especially design changes)

To put it bluntly, even the military is requiring electronic processes now, but this company’s procedures are still all on paper. As soon as there are samples, material follow-ups, or various other miscellaneous tasks, everything gets thrown to engineering. Quality control and production control are completely useless. (Because of the way the teams are divided, the product engineers in the other team do not assemble samples, so they basically don’t have this problem.) Once you get busy with samples and have no time to close cases, they will still pressure you to do it. The company makes the processing time for each case impossible. Design-change cases and similar tasks can only pile up there (and when design makes a mistake, they submit a design change request...). They keep accumulating over time, and there are always endless cases that cannot be closed. When someone leaves because of this, you also have to take over that person’s unfinished cases. Basically, it’s a complete mess.

3. Overtime is expected

If you don’t want to come in on holidays, then you basically can’t finish the work without working overtime on weekdays. No overtime = unfinished work = a lower performance rating.

Do not apply for product engineering here under any circumstances. Basically, you have to personally go to the production line for every miscellaneous task. Even if you ask the local assembly workers for help, you may get yelled at by the production-line staff. It’s truly humiliating—you have to beg people everywhere just to barely get things done. Then management starts thinking that every assembly task must be easy and can simply be handed to product engineering, so they endlessly order you to keep assembling samples. Wasn’t I applying to be an operator?

Here’s the problem: not every product engineer is responsible for assembling samples. Only one team is busy with assembly, so the workloads of the two product-engineering teams are completely different. You’ll find that the difference in workload is enormous. One side is basically a highly paid operator, running back and forth between the production line and the office and working themselves to death. The salary is nearly NT$10,000 lower than design’s, yet the workload is several times greater.

The other side only needs to send out documents and has little difficulty. Basically, this position is a lottery. You even have to chase the PM yourself for suppliers to provide materials, and designers will ask you how to make things they designed themselves. It’s truly absurd.

Overall, I still highly recommend the other positions as places to build experience, as long as you avoid certain terrible roles. After all, we’re all low-paid workers earning a living, so don’t make yourself suffer too much. Choose an easier position instead, and don’t join product engineering.

Fortunately, I left.