The rules and procedures are clear, and administrative efficiency is fairly good. Although things are a bit cumbersome, people generally put a lot of effort into them. Most colleagues are fairly normal, and overall the atmosphere maintains a polite distance. When you encounter problems and ask someone for help, they will usually assist you and generally won’t drag things out.
The salary is mediocre. The manager of one department has a peculiar personality and is often full of anxiety, using an emotional tone and making emotionally charged remarks. Sometimes they directly blame subordinates for problems while completely distancing themselves from their own issues. Even when it is clearly found to be their own problem, they can step down without the slightest embarrassment. Arguing your case is completely pointless; you will only be criticized for having poor communication skills.
My experience being mentored during the probationary period was extremely poor. Two colleagues were extremely arrogant. With only one or two more years of seniority, they adopted the attitude of veteran employees and tried to dominate newcomers. They were incredibly controlling: if you didn’t obey them, they would immediately complain to the manager after you got off work. Worse still, they would invite you to lunch, take you to a small meeting room under the pretext of eating together, and question you about why you weren’t following their instructions properly. It was outrageous.
Because I insisted on my own judgment, I nearly had a major falling-out with them. In the end, however, the boss liked my work, which successfully got the two colleagues to quiet down and led the manager to order them to stop mentoring new employees.
The atmosphere throughout the company is quite traditional, like a conventional manufacturing business. Personally, I feel there are many unspoken rules; things are often said one way on the surface but may not actually work that way, so you have to learn to read the situation. The boss frequently overturns previously discussed directions and starts over from scratch. I feel this causes many people to experience greater work pressure and a lack of security. As a result, when collaborating with colleagues, everyone seems to be guessing what the boss will like, but no one can figure it out, because the boss often doesn’t clearly know what they want either. They place somewhat too much trust in their own judgment and do not respect professional expertise enough.
This company is suitable for people who seek stability, do not have too many opinions, and have an obedient, well-behaved personality. The benefits are not too bad, and there is a bonus system and a guaranteed year-end bonus. However, the company culture is quite traditional, so everyone should consider carefully. One more point is that the company develops its own products, so many of the work skills you gain may not be useful once you leave this company. If you are considering your future career plans, you should think it through carefully.
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The interviewer was late. After I stated my expected salary, he spent several months trying to haggle it down. Fortunately, I had an offer in hand at the time, so I ignored him. It’s a good thing I didn’t join a company like that.
1. There’s not much office politics, and everyone is generally polite.
2. The company places a lot of importance on employee training. From time to time, there are small activities where they give out gift vouchers worth a few hundred dollars.
3. The company has non-Taiwanese members, so don’t be afraid to talk to them—you can learn a lot.
4. “Most” of the colleagues are very nice and willing to spend time communicating.
5. Unlike a hardware company, this is a software company. If you can tough it out, you can really learn a lot from your colleagues.
6. The chairs are seriously comfortable, no complaints lol
1. One marketing department has no manager, so everything has to be coordinated with the general manager and vice president. There’s basically no one to deal with your problems in a timely manner.
2. The company does arrange training, but the vast majority of things require you to learn on your own in silence. Even if you have the courage to ask, your colleagues are already scrambling to put out their own fires and have no time to help you.
3. At the beginning, HR will do everything they can to cut your salary. You end up earning less than others while doing three times as much work as usual. Even if you report to a manager, they basically won’t help handle anything—you have to deal with every bit of grunt work yourself. (Of course, you don’t get a manager’s salary.)
4. The workload and breadth of the position’s responsibilities are absurdly extensive. It’s normal to take unfinished work home, and overtime is the norm. Even senior colleagues often reply at 11 or 12 p.m. on Friday nights, or respond on weekends. On the surface, you’re paid by the hour, but in reality you’re expected to work overtime regularly. And, sorry, there’s no overtime pay. If you don’t finish something, you’ll be harshly criticized over the weekend.
5. Even though it’s a 20-year-old company, senior colleagues often still don’t understand what the boss is thinking, and disagreements in approach frequently arise. Things that should be standardized require senior colleagues to repeatedly set aside time to teach others without compensation. It’s extremely inefficient and also makes it more difficult for new hires to learn.
6. In the position I originally held, three people could leave within a year, not counting me.
7. Although the company does business overseas and has foreign employees, its thinking is still very old-fashioned.
8. Layoffs are also very sudden. You could still be in a meeting in the morning and be told in the afternoon that it’s your last day, with HR immediately coming over to arrange your resignation. That same evening, your company accounts are deleted, which shows they have a lot of experience doing this kind of thing.
Very little office politics
The development process is still stuck in the last century, and everyone from the PM to the RD head just muddles through. When they receive a task, they only care about whether the schedule will slip, and rarely consider whether the request itself is reasonable. And the schedule still slips anyway. The sales boss has flawed logical thinking, speaks loudly, and loves to talk. But their train of thought often goes off the rails, leaving everyone waiting while they go around in circles until there is no time left in the meeting to discuss the actual issues.
One of the few local companies developing imaging and visual technologies
1. Although the company has grown to over 100 employees, its development processes and internal operations leave much to be desired.
2. Some of the newer R&D staff are quite good, but there are also some arrogant old-timers who act as if they are above everyone else. They deserve to get beaten up.
3. Although the company is in the software industry, its early workforce was more diverse, so the culture remains quite conservative and old-fashioned.
4. Because two senior managers control the company, many old-timers in different departments love to suck up to them. They go through the motions to deceive them, and being one of their subordinates is very difficult.
5. QA is a frontier department: neither management nor other departments care about it, and the testing methods are outrageous…
It has basically become a company centered around R&D alternative service personnel: R&D alternative service, PM alternative service, Sales alternative service—the list goes on.
It feels very cost-down-oriented. Overtime can only be submitted for reimbursement by "TEAM" as a unit. Most employees do not own any stock, yet they are expected to accompany the big boss in pursuing the dream of an IPO. With this approach, the company should be making a lot of profit~~
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During the interview, they said your abilities were insufficient and wanted to throw you into Product Manager
Product Manager is a lower-paying job
Later, I went to another one and encountered someone from Chia Shang who said she used to be a Product Manager too, but what she did was animation
Maybe the whole company is made up of Product Managers—what a strange company
They’re already located in a godforsaken place, yet they still use such underhanded methods to cut professionals’ salaries
Labor and health insurance contributions are not underreported, but the salary is mediocre.
Compared with the animation industry, it's about average; compared with the IT industry as a whole, it depends on how much you love animation.
It's decent for newcomers to build up their skills, and after a year or two you can probably move on.
As long as they aren't colleagues in management positions, most coworkers are easy to get along with.
All overtime is “voluntary,” and the missed-meal allowance is only 100, with the additional requirement that you work past 8 p.m. to claim it.
(For example, if your workday ends, you want to keep working, but you finish before 8 p.m., you can't take the boxed meal home ^_<)
Think twice before joining as an alternative-service research and development substitute; one R&D department is made up almost entirely of such employees, and leaving at around 9 p.m. every night is practically the norm.
Overall, quite a few people “voluntarily” work overtime. If you want to leave somewhat on time, the only exception is probably the team developing iClone.
The company's big promise is an IPO, but, Ray-Fan, many people below the top still don't have any stock. It seems the big shots are chasing their dreams while the people underneath sell their lives to follow along.
Also, the head of R&D at this company has serious problems. I'll refer to him as “the abbot” below.
In other departments, the impression is that department heads will stand up for and shield their own teams.
But when something happens in R&D, even if the responsibility doesn't lie with R&D, the abbot still requires the R&D staff to apologize first (showing OO) to demonstrate sincerity.
The abbot's understanding of technology is also one of a kind. When the people underneath were reviewing whether waterfall development had problems and whether they should try agile development or other approaches to make changes, the abbot actually said: “Agile development is for small apps. Large APPLICATIONS like ours aren't suitable for it.” Looking at the news from a few days ago, where Microsoft said VS would switch entirely to agile development, I was completely floored.
The years of experience among the R&D engineers are quite M-shaped: those who manage to endure long enough may be able to stay, but otherwise people usually hit a bottleneck where they stop learning anything after about two years. The company's technical managers are quite unfamiliar with design patterns; some have even wondered why everything inside an interface is pure virtual.
Some veteran R&D employees are usually very good at hiding their tricks and playing Tai Chi. Most of the time, they wield this technique skillfully, but when certain modules come up, they hide their moves and handle them themselves. Later, I had a chance to look at those modules, and they were really no more complicated than a basic “wild ball” punch; they weren't that difficult to understand.
Also, during product testing, the performance of both R&D and QA is judged by “numbers.” QA faces performance pressure to find duplicate bugs, while R&D faces performance pressure to resolve a certain number of bugs. Although everyone says to resolve the important ones first, at weekly meetings the QA manager loves to publicly call out R&D staff who haven't met their targets, causing everyone to start keeping bugs in reserve. Senior colleagues even tell you to solve a mix of easy and difficult ones—the most important thing is to fill the quota. Because management's logic from above is: if we keep following this number, it will eventually go down to zero~~
Speaking of numbers, one can't omit the abbot's classic line: “Do you have evidence that these numbers came from everyone working overtime?” At that moment, the entire team suddenly no longer knew what they were doing. If you object to his numbers, the abbot's way of calculating them may exceed your imagination. Even if you go to the restroom during the day or go to the convenience store across the street to buy an afternoon snack, he wants you to calculate the time precisely. Strangely, he only calculates time during working hours; he doesn't seem to care nearly as much about time after the scheduled end of the workday.
Newcomers also need to guard against people who aren't managers frequently trying to sneak work onto them. Learn to set boundaries yourself; otherwise, remember: all overtime is voluntary.
For R&D, unless you love animation, there are many other companies willing to offer newcomers better pay and conditions than this place. The political culture in this R&D department is too strange; think carefully before joining.
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I've already been quite polite by not mentioning that products often enter testing before they're finished, or that near the end of testing, senior managers suddenly want to change specifications and add features, and so on. The PM has absolutely no concept of paying down technical debt, and the list goes on. Rather than a technology company, it's more like a traditional manufacturing business.
A good place for newcomers to hone their skills. Just follow through on the tasks assigned by management; there isn’t much office politics, and you can stay for the long term.