醬子科技股份有限公司

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Is Jiangzi still around? It feels like the boss has already skipped town.

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The turnover rate is extremely high, and the boss also fires people. Basically, if you are unwilling to cooperate with the company’s requests for overtime, you need to be careful. Project timelines are essentially determined solely by the boss (and are always set very tightly). The estimated work hours are basically meaningless. Salaries are kept very low. Officially, overtime is said to be claimable, but during my employment I never saw anyone receive overtime pay. It is very difficult to take leave. The turnover rate is very high for both engineers and PMs, so work handovers are extremely unclear and there are many problems. If an engineer displeases the boss, they may even ask you to transfer to a PM role... You have to provide your own computer for work, whether you are an engineer or a PM, and there is no subsidy.

The boss speaks very pleasantly during interviews, so be careful about that. I initially asked whether the company used web front-end technologies and whether it had web front-end engineers. The boss said the company had front-end engineers and that I could learn after joining. I also asked about the size of the engineering team, and the boss said it was a small company with about 20 people.

It turned out that I was heavily misled. Including me, there were only three engineers; the rest were PMs, PEs (project execution interns), and marketing interns. There was a front-end engineer, but it was an Android front-end engineer who had only been working for six months—there was no web front-end engineer at all. Because the company couldn't find an iOS engineer, the work had already been outsourced for half a year.....

The entire company had only three engineers, while the remaining seven or eight were outsourced engineers whom we didn't meet (three of them were third-year university students who came as summer interns).

Employee turnover was extremely high. Other than the sales employee, who was the boss's close friend from when he was young, the most senior employee was a middle-aged C# backend engineer who had been there for two and a half years. Everyone else had been there for less than six months. If you stayed there for four or five months, you would already be the second-most senior person in the entire company.

Nearly 30 people left the company within six months. The highest record was six people leaving in one month, and most people left after anywhere from three days to three months. The company recruited two iOS engineers at once after searching for more than six months, but both resigned after only two weeks.

There was absolutely no training. Since the company had almost no engineers, new engineers had to figure everything out on their own, like blind men feeling an elephant. There was little room for improvement and no one to learn from. The situation was the same for PMs and designers, which was why people often resigned after only two or three weeks.

The boss is obsessed with cutting costs. Employees even have to provide their own work laptops (with no reimbursement). During the interview, the boss said there would be a half-day Happy Hour every month to watch movies, but after joining, I discovered that Happy Hour was often ignored. On top of that, NT$300 was deducted from our salary every month to subsidize Happy Hour—something I had not been told about at all.

The company had no systems or structure whatsoever. In a typical project company, each PM would lead an engineering team, and the projects assigned to that PM would be developed by that team. PMs usually have some technical background or have transitioned from engineering. Here, however, there were four or five full-time PMs, who hired seven or eight university interns at the cheap rate of NT$21,000 to serve as PEs (project execution staff) and do the full-time PMs' work. Each person handled two or three projects simultaneously. The most alarming part was that none of the PMs or PEs understood technology at all; even nursing-school students were hired as PMs. Since the PMs and PEs were all inexperienced newcomers or interns, they often ended up doing odd jobs, inefficient trivial tasks, and chasing clients with phone calls, resulting in everyone being frantically busy all day and not leaving until 8 p.m.

The company's three or four full-time engineers were shared among all the PMs and PEs, causing the Android and iOS engineers to frequently develop six or seven projects at the same time. The boss would rather spend money hiring many interns at NT$21,000 each to serve as PEs than hire engineers. Even the administrative staff were interns. When there were not enough engineers, work was handed to outsourcing teams or outsourced for NT$25,000 to engineering interns still attending university. The code quality was never reviewed, so after the outsourced work was returned, the company had to maintain it. If there were bugs, the company's full-time engineers were responsible for fixing them, including examining code they had not written themselves.

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Number of interns > Number of regular employees

Currently, APP outsourcing is all about competing on price. The company has no profit, so it has resorted to controlling costs by hiring cheaper engineers with little experience who are just entering the workforce and by compressing development schedules. It has no intention of building and managing an engineering team. However, this approach is clearly not working well. Now, the vast majority of projects are outsourced, and the timelines are very short, leaving no time for research. There is also no senior engineer available to consult, which results in the creation of a pile of truly frightening code. The company does not value its employees, so it cannot retain talent. During the development stage, several engineers and PMs may be assigned to a single project, and handoffs create many hidden costs. The development of each project is getting worse and worse. The company now wants senior engineers to turn things around, but many experienced hires leave as soon as they see that something is wrong. The company’s turnover rate is extremely high—if you stay for a year, you will have met nearly a hundred people at a minimum, with one group arriving after another and one group leaving after another.

Looking at the work from the past, I really feel that the company must have been quite impressive before. How did it end up like this?

The boss is the type who suddenly decides to do something as soon as he thinks of it. This applies to both the company’s direction and its policies—they constantly change, and in the long term, it is completely unclear which direction the company intends to take. Management is based on “the boss has the final say,” with micromanagement being the norm. He needs to know what you are doing every day, even every hour, especially when a project is delayed. However, projects are basically always delayed. Projects are often taken on at very low profit margins or at prices that were miscalculated in order to win the contract, and the only solution is to make up for it by putting in more hours. The business model of a contract development company is: junior programmers—low pay × long hours; senior programmers—high pay × shorter hours. Isn’t the result basically the same? Unless the company fundamentally resolves its survival model of winning contracts through low prices, it will remain stuck in this quagmire forever.

During the two or three years when apps were at their peak, the boss successfully capitalized on the trend. A few years ago, the company was a well-known app outsourcing firm, and its achievements were quite substantial. However, the app boom quickly declined afterward, and the market suddenly became a red ocean. The company failed to transform successfully and now survives by taking on large numbers of cheap, low-margin outsourcing projects. Engineers working themselves to the bone is the norm.

The boss’s word is law. If he says something is easy, then it is easy—so why can’t it be finished in four hours? Overtime pay can be claimed under company policy, but it is recommended that you first familiarize yourself with the relevant rights under the Labor Standards Act, so that you are not intimidated by a supervisor’s words into being afraid to claim it. The Labor Affairs Bureau is absolutely everyone’s good friend.