睿智通機器人股份有限公司

Sounds impressive?

There is a female manager who is very manipulative, does not understand technology, and loves to meddle. If you really go to work there, you should definitely stay away from her.

Being a manager at this company is really great. Although it is a startup that is sprinting forward, you can still take care of your family, work regular hours, have few responsibilities, and earn a high salary.

The above advantages apply only to management-level employees.

1. There are many foreigners here, and they are all easy to get along with. The foreign managers are also very nice.

2. It is said that you can use English frequently.

3. It’s a robotics company, which sounds really awesome~~

4. You don’t have to clock in at work. Work starts at 9:00, but you can come to the office after 10:00 if you want. There is a female employee at the company who always does this.

5. You can receive stock dividends after the IPO.

Actually, this company is Quan Zhi Tong Robotics, Aeolus Robot. I don’t know what happened, but supposedly it has changed its name several times. Every time, they say it is to avoid one thing or another.....It just feels very strange; a legitimate company should not operate this way.

Senior executive A was lucky and managed to make a fortune while working at a software company. He later worked at Lite-On and Quanta, but his true abilities were quickly exposed, and he left hastily not long afterward. He often considers himself superior to others and likes to question people with some of his foolish yet self-proclaimed brilliant ideas. However, because he is the boss, no one dares to tell him the truth and can only remain silent. As a result, he becomes even more self-righteous.

Another senior executive, S, has a finance background and knows virtually nothing about products, but is afraid of being exposed, so he tries to act as though he understands everything. At every company-wide meeting, the two of them put on an approachable and open-minded facade, as if everything were open for discussion. However, they blur employees’ opinions by spouting grand but impractical principles. Over time, everyone stopped wanting to raise problems, and meetings feel like self-congratulatory performances.

1. Management: The company’s management is seriously problematic. There is one set of rules for Taiwanese employees and another for foreigners. I once heard that when people went on business trips together, foreigners got one room each, while Taiwanese employees had to share two to a room. The salary structures are also different: Taiwanese employees’ salaries are divided over 14 months, while foreigners’ salaries are paid directly over 12 months. The people who exploit and bully Taiwanese employees are Taiwanese themselves. It is truly pathetic; these old Taiwanese employees like to use their seniority to take advantage of others. Externally, they package Quan Zhi Tong as a foreign company and claim to follow a foreign-company management style, but in reality it uses an extremely old-fashioned Taiwanese management approach. The pay is also very much like that at a Taiwanese company, and I have rarely heard of anyone getting a raise. They make ESOAP sound as if it were very valuable, but it is actually just a piece of wastepaper.

2. Stock: They constantly brainwash employees by saying that the company will IPO in X years, but the timeline keeps being postponed, and they are always painting an overly rosy picture. Regardless of how hard new employees work, the number of shares they receive is pitifully small. At market value, the shares allocated in a year might not even be enough to buy a second-hand iPhone.

3. Products: There has never been a comprehensive review or plan for a medium- or long-term roadmap, and the required specifications are changed again and again. Problems are handled reactively, treating the headache rather than the cause. Every schedule they announce is extremely rushed, and after everyone works hard to complete it, the PM says that something else is more urgent... The main reason is that he himself has no clear understanding of the product direction. In the end, priorities are based on whatever keeps him from being criticized. They always impose impossible deadlines, and raising concerns is useless. Eventually, people simply give up; if things do not work out, they can just pat themselves on the rear and leave.

4. Talent: Senior management constantly claims to value talent, but in practice they never treat employees as assets. They treat people more like paper towels in a restroom: when they need you, they ask about your well-being every day; once they get what they need and have used you, they throw you aside and ignore you.

5. Outlook: When people first joined, everyone hoped to create a different kind of industry. In reality, no matter which generation this robot is, it has very little practical functionality.....To put it bluntly, it has little real artificial intelligence (AI) capability. For example, if you move the robot to an unfamiliar new environment, place a cup on a table three meters in front of it, and expect the robot to bring the cup to you, it cannot do so without pre-written hard code....... They used investors’ money to build a robot that can move and looks very cool, then use it to attract even more funding—basically waiting for whichever wealthy backer has money to burn to take the bait.....

I have never heard anyone discuss future mass production and shipments, because everyone believes that a design like this cannot be mass-produced. There is far too much to list. The experience accounts written by the senior employees above are very vivid and dramatic, but they are all true....

There are many foreign colleagues, so you can practice English or various other languages.

The management team is selected according to the CEO’s personal preferences rather than objective assessments of ability, so they are not very capable. Almost all of them are two-faced and all talk with no action. Only the hardware manager is somewhat better and reasonably communicative. If you just want to earn a salary and gain experience and do not care whether your manager is good, you can give it a try.

1. A small startup company with a relatively flat organization, offering more opportunities to interact with senior management.

2. Same as above: the company is small, but it has engineers in various fields, making it easier to learn about different areas.

3. The junior employees are nice and easy to get along with.

4. A foreign company; when I first joined, the company atmosphere was fairly relaxed (until it gradually got worse later on).

5. Same as point 4: it really is a foreign company with foreigners, so if you are in a science- or engineering-oriented position, you may have opportunities to practice a second foreign language more.

1. The flip side of the same thing is that it becomes a disadvantage. The organization is flat, so there are many opportunities to interact with senior management, but you also get to see how incompetent they are; in most cases, their skill at talking exceeds their actual substance.

2. It is a startup, and its product is a robot, so the product’s future is worrying. To be honest, Taiwan’s robotics industry is not yet mature, yet the company wants to enter the Japanese market. What they said on the television program (the TX segment) sounded good, but most of it was just bluffing. The company’s robots have no so-called “intelligence” or “self-thinking” capability, and there is no machine learning; at most, they can build a map, like a robot vacuum. The hardware has no core technology either—everything is pieced together from different fields. The company does have a technical consultant and an engineering lead with robotics backgrounds, but they also lack experience with “humanoid” robots. The product has remained in the debugging stage, and although mass production has genuinely begun, there are still many problems with testing the assembled units. The robot can perform very few functions. On the TX program, they said that placing the basket on the floor was to avoid human-to-human contact, but in reality it was because the robot could only place the basket on the floor; these are standard movements hard-coded into it (not to mention that the basket sometimes falls down).

3. Senior management likes flattering comments and is the kind that pulls a sour face as soon as it hears criticism or suggestions. There is also a very serious problem with racial discrimination. Discrimination by Taiwanese against Taiwanese is genuinely severe. The senior management throughout the company is like this: strange policies are applied only to Taiwanese employees, while foreigners can work from home, and even disappear for an entire morning without anyone daring to say anything. Taiwanese employees work hard, but senior management does not even offer a word of praise. I even heard that Taiwanese engineers who had been with the company for a long time and had previously received stock allocations were given three or four fewer shares than foreign engineers who joined later. Senior management also only takes the initiative to speak with foreigners, even though their own English is honestly poor (extremely Taiwanese-style English, with a very limited vocabulary), so communication barriers sometimes arise. Yet they insist on speaking English with Taiwanese employees, adding a few English words here and there while often using verbs and nouns incorrectly—I have no idea what they are trying to express. Most of the foreigners at the company have good attitudes; only a few speak to you with the attitude of white racial superiority. Otherwise, everyone is generally easy to get along with.

4. The company is very bad at judging people. There are many incompetent people inside the company, but because they occupy senior positions, they effectively get promoted into those roles simply by accumulating work experience. It calls itself a foreign company, but among the people in senior management, it is really half and half: half are actually foreigners, while the other half are very traditional middle-aged or older men. If you point out their mistakes to their faces and hope to improve the company’s systems, you can imagine what will happen to you. Incompetence among lower-level employees is also left unchecked because performance reviews consist merely of having employees fill out their own forms and are completely opaque. Usually, even incompetent junior employees can coast for at least a year before being reported by other junior employees. The layoffs during the pandemic were even more miserable: many technical leads in middle management were removed, and several engineers at the bottom were also forced out, while assistants were allowed to stay? The company only wants to retain people who obediently follow instructions and do their work; those who speak up and point out mistakes usually do not last long.

5. Hardware employees are not valued; this is a company led by software and PMs. The company is very “male chauvinist,” and verbal bullying is everywhere in the workplace. At one meeting, there was only one young female engineer among the engineers. When a new male colleague joined, the male PM asked him in front of everyone whether he had a girlfriend. The man said he was already married, and the male PM then said in front of everyone, “What a shame for XXX (the female engineer),” as if women were born to get married and have children. The company is controlled by the PMs and foreigners, and the head PM’s management style is very strange. He loves making people write pointless reports (I believe it is because those senior managers who love to talk also enjoy reading them). He said that the company would stop using email and use only Slack (a business version of software similar to LINE). When you ask him about A, he digresses into something completely unrelated to A, then talks about how much he knows about the subject. I would often think to myself, “Then why don’t you stop being a PM and do the work of those positions instead? XD”

6. Company morale is low. The software side is still fairly all right, but the hardware side, and even procurement, have little confidence in the company’s products. This is largely because of the company’s racial discrimination: Taiwanese employees think, “No matter how well I do, I will not be praised,” so they do their work half-heartedly. People with passion and ideals eventually have those qualities extinguished after being repeatedly discouraged.

7. A startup with very little structure or management. There is no clocking in or out, HR does not keep any attendance records at all, and there is no system for overtime pay or compensatory time off. The company shows very little regard for its employees, treating their hopes for the company as unreasonable nitpicking. New employees have no guidelines to follow, and the company does not require anyone to retain or share information. As a result, when problems occur, there is often no way to trace them; sometimes engineers do not even inform others about experiments they have completed themselves, so the same tasks are often repeated or left undone.

The disadvantages really far outweigh the advantages, and there are far too many to list. If you want to collect a paycheck while worrying about whether this company will go bankrupt or be sold, and get blindsided every day, then you are welcome to come try this company!