分眾傳媒股份有限公司

1. I don’t know whether this can really be considered an advantage, but this division seems to have simply bought the rights to use the name from the China-based Focus Media division. If you’re an engineer, you can understand that we forked from Focus Media China. Although both companies operate elevator media, as far as I know, there is no actual connection to Focus Media China in terms of operations.

2. It has now been renamed “EBC Focus Media.” The R&D department here is a startup division that plays a role in guiding the company’s digital transformation. So, if the projects succeed and the company prospers, you might receive stock or something similar.

3. You have the opportunity to learn how to handle high traffic and big data here, because there really are more than a million requests from advertising machines to the servers every day, as well as many tables containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of records.

1. Overtime? Doesn’t exist: It seems that on-call work and overtime outside working hours can’t be reported. They say it’s because I didn’t submit a report myself, but I heard from colleagues that when they stayed after work to handle things, their overtime forms were apparently rejected by HR. However, they were apparently able to apply to convert it into compensatory leave. On average, there isn’t too much overtime; when there is, it’s usually less than four hours a week.

2. Unfriendly to newcomers: Because this is a new department, before this there wasn’t a single person here familiar with software development, nor were there sufficient system documents or an onboarding culture. (The backend system documentation has gradually been improving since I joined.) New hires here often need to spend an entire week just sitting around before they can really start working. Of course, you can be your own teacher, but this isn’t the best environment for a beginner to learn independently.

3. Waiting until the end of time: Some things may take less than a day to do, but waiting for the administrative process can cost you two weeks.

4. Real estate sales mindset: In most cases, applying to purchase any equipment is both slow and limited in terms of options. The company requires you to first look for computers/accessories/blah blah blah through the e-commerce sites of affiliated companies. Unless there is a specific reason that you absolutely need a specification only available from another vendor, there are no exceptions.

5. No separation between personal and professional communication: Currently, only a few departments use Teams. A bunch of LINE groups keep popping up all day long. In several groups, 99% of the content has nothing to do with you, yet you are required to join them. I once quietly left a group and was immediately discovered; the next morning, I was called in for a discussion.

6. Useless teammates: There is one particular engineer who was “traded” over from another company with me early on (it’s a bit complicated to explain~omitted). He’s really a disaster... poor comprehension, inefficient, poor memory and doesn’t take notes, timid and afraid of responsibility, and loves shifting blame and making excuses. Whenever there’s a problem with the code, the phrase I hear most often is, “This was written by the former R(three tones)D...” or “I’m just here to clean up the mess.” In reality, he has been responsible for this project for nearly four times as long as that former RD. As soon as things start pointing in the wrong direction, he throws absent people under the bus to take the blame. Earlier, when we discussed having him rewrite the entire app project, he suddenly strongly suggested merging this new project with another company project (aka find cover!). The former CTO and I both agreed that a feature could be completed within three days, but it ended up taking more than a month. There were all kinds of bizarre situations. When I privately asked colleagues at his former company who had worked with him, they were basically unanimous in their negative assessment. His former manager put it even more directly: “Heh (wry smile), when has one of his updates ever not caused problems?” I had even prepared a series of meme images for him as backups. He’s a “senior engineer” so useless that he makes people laugh out loud and has become a source of chat memes.