橋椿金屬股份有限公司

I’m an assistant in the IT department.

Whenever I have a request, I can ask my colleagues and get help. However, I often handle things myself, and my colleagues still remind me to tell them in the future so they can help.

When I first joined, the assistants from each department would go out of their way to check in on me (I heard that many IT assistants had quickly burned out before).

But I feel that everyone treats me very well, and my supervisor is also very kind to me.

Assistant Xiao is very humble. They even gave me a very cute planner (Does that count? XDDD).

Although Vice President Ye can be very stern, they always focus on the matter, not the person. They are a logical elder, and as long as you humbly ask for advice, they are always happy to teach you.

I heard there is a lot of infighting in the quality control and sales departments, but it has nothing to do with me. I’m good friends with the assistants there.

I had to resign because I got married and moved to another county. When I was going through the resignation process and asked a certain supervisor, S, for approval, they said that using marriage as an excuse to resign was really a good idea, which I found extremely rude. However, this S supervisor is widely known in the company for being rude, so I’m not surprised!

When you can leave work on time

Business Assistant – Product R&D

Nature of the work:

The work is project-oriented. The quality issues that arise for each part number and the information that needs to be tracked with the factory are handled separately (managed in separate Outlook folders).

Because the factory is located in mainland China, there is basically no opportunity to see the products in person (apart from model images in the product catalog and representative zinc samples on the section manager’s desk).

The section manager will guide you through the entire workflow. Since the section manager also has a very heavy workload, it is recommended that you be prepared to receive a large amount of information each time and remember everything after hearing it just once.

Every morning, there is a fixed email review meeting (with the assistant manager, or with everyone gathered in a conference room, reporting the contents of their emails to the vice president).

Company policy requires all emails to be printed on paper (whether received or outgoing emails, including attachments—for example, even a 50-page Excel file must be printed in full). Before sending an email, you have to wait for the section manager and assistant manager to revise it and return it before clicking Send. If they are not there, you can only wait for the email to be returned before leaving work.

At first glance, the email content will absolutely look like a foreign language to someone unfamiliar with the field, with many English abbreviations. At the beginning, you will be encouraged to ask as many questions as possible, and it is recommended that you ask whenever you can (although the section manager is still busy), so you may feel unsure where to begin. Emails sent to the factory follow an extremely complicated established format (part number, font, size, color, and tone). If anything is incorrect, you will revise the email back and forth until it is approved. This trains everyone’s observational skills to a considerable degree.

The environment:

It is true that the people around you are all women, but there is normally no free time to chat. Eventually, you often find yourself interacting only with the computer and the section manager.

Future prospects:

After doing the job for a long time, you can become familiar with the wording used in emails. However, because the work deals exclusively with internal business matters, you never get to see the products, and you cannot clearly understand what is happening at the factory (many people at the factory have quite an attitude), it is questionable whether this communication can help you build professional expertise.

You cannot help but think: if you were to change companies, would what you take with you really be worthwhile?

If you think you can handle all of the above with ease, I wish you the best of luck in getting the job.

1

The head of the IT department berates people every day. IT is a perpetual vacancy because the likelihood of being driven out soon after joining is very high.

There are really a lot of attractive female sales staff here.

The assistant in my department is also very attractive.

My colleagues are nice.

I can't think of any other advantages.

The vacancies in a few departments are not bad.

The only good thing is that the assistant is very attractive.

Some managers often forget what they themselves have said.

They keep watching productivity all day.

Then they are dissatisfied once the work is completed.

It still has to be handled manually.

And the company really has a lot of vice presidents.

Just as mentioned above, there are really a bunch of relatives and cronies.

Public holidays off and regular working hours

Having public holidays off is fake, and regular working hours are fake too.

Some time ago, in order to increase production capacity, they unilaterally changed the employment contract.

Later, to avoid being reported, they held a labor-management consultation, but ultimately disregarded all objections.

The middle and lower-level managers ignored the frontline staff’s opposition and applauded the approval of the AB-shift rotation.

They were only short of standing up and applauding, plus one day off per month, bowing and shouting,

“Long live, long live, long live forever”—in other words, working unpaid as free labor.

I. Royal relatives and cronies can do whatever they want—certain personnel responsible for parts of a production line

hide away and play on their phones. Even when an abnormality has already appeared on the production line, they finish playing first

before dealing with it. If someone without connections uses their phone to communicate work matters via LINE,

they will be suspected of playing on their phone. Yet this gentleman plays so openly that even after being discovered,

nothing happens to him. At most, he is transferred to another line.

II. The job duties do not match the position—at the factories I worked at previously, the job openings were at least more closely aligned.

At least there would not be situations where someone with a higher job grade does lower-grade work. At Chia Chun, the title says “engineer,”

but the duties range from loading and unloading materials to handling product issues from the preceding process.

Even casting and melting issues from the preceding process are dragged into this department. There is no choice: casting and melting belongs to the king’s people,

and everyone else is the king’s horse!

III. New employees and occupational safety concepts still need to be properly implemented—the quality of new employees varies too widely.

In the first group, all sorts of people get hired through interviews. Some boast of having decades of experience in traditional manufacturing,

but do not even understand the operating range of production-line automation sensors and robotic arms; they only talk about their past glories!

Others are hired simply because they worked in sheet-metal fabrication at some traditional manufacturing company. In another group, because the factory is hot,

machine designs lack spatial awareness. When replacing parts or inspecting and repairing equipment, the spaces are cramped, and Lockout/Tagout (the safety lockout and tagging procedure)

is not properly implemented.

There was once a colleague performing an inspection and repair who was nearly injured when someone on the line accidentally activated the equipment. Fortunately, there were only minor abrasions. As for the senior management,

there is not much more to say. Whether workplace-safety requirements are actually implemented still depends on the mindset of those at the top.

IV. Only production capacity is reviewed; yield is not—speaking of the AB shift, because production capacity was low, weekend production began.

It was initially thought to be temporary, until a colleague asked in a meeting when it would end. Management only replied: “That depends on when your production capacity meets the orders.”

However, even if the orders were met, weekend production lines would continue to operate.

That statement was equivalent to saying nothing. Instead of reviewing yield, they only want to increase production capacity. The products clearly have casting and melting problems,

but the downstream QC team only blames the middle-stage process and completely dares not scrutinize the upstream casting and melting process. Even when there is a problem with the mold,

the same thing happens. One senior manager even said things like, “It’ll be fine in two days.” Such remarks continue to circulate throughout the production line:

that if a mold abnormality is left for two days, it will get better. Truly a miracle of the materials industry!

V. Such a huge factory with so many production lines, yet there is no MES—everything is done through primitive, improvised methods. As if that were not enough,

it is like the Great Leap Forward’s delusion of turning iron into steel. Do they think they are starring in Fullmetal Alchemist?

The process-development position is supposed to improve yield and production capacity, but it has been reduced to doing loading and unloading, cleaning, and pushing product issues to the front end on-site.

All the problems are in the middle and downstream stages; the downstream QC team pushes everything onto the middle stage, while no one dares to push issues to the upstream casting and melting process.

They have plenty of equipment, but do not value the integration and analysis of software-based production data. The production line has piles of data,

yet everything ends up going its own way.

Finally, my advice to young people is to think carefully before considering this job. When a workplace has too many royal relatives and cronies, even if you do the right thing,

it will still somehow become your fault, because senior management is never wrong. The mistake is that you joined this company. Finding another factory would be much better than Chia Chun.

The quality department has no advantages.

In my experience on the front lines,

the other production units are also a complete mess.

There are many attractive women in the business department upstairs.

Other than that, it is utterly terrible, yet they still damn well expect me to write about its advantages.

Fuck.

The quality assurance manager requires falsifying accounts.

The production units completely ignore quality because of the cowardice of Manager Li in quality assurance.

People keep leaving in droves, yet he still shows no sign of changing.

Known as Master Li the Tai Chi expert—whenever he deflects force, he deflects it onto his own people.

The vice president of quality assurance only knows how to paint rosy pictures, as if his family had run a pastry shop for a hundred years.

But you will never get to eat any of the pastries.

Known as the K-brand old pastry seller, specializing in transparent wife cakes and transparent sun cakes.

If you are thinking of going to the quality department, it is simply an absolute disaster. You need to think it through carefully.

The entire company is just unbelievably bad.

A nepotistic state-owned enterprise.

When the boss finds your obesity and excess weight displeasing, he fires you outright, without considering at all that you work diligently.

There are a bunch of vice presidents in one company, all fighting for power, and not one of them has the balls to step up and take responsibility.

To put it simply:

Terrible.