全國公證檢驗股份有限公司

1. Overtime pay: 18:00–18:30 is considered break time and is unpaid; after that, overtime is reported by the hour.

2. Flexible working hours: Clocking in between 09:00 and 09:15 is not considered late, but remember to push your clock-out time back accordingly.

A simple bullet-point list from a technically minded person who doesn’t want to explain anymore! Please think about it carefully.

1. The company atmosphere is bad.

2. There are a bunch of newcomers.

3. The old-timers are very noisy.

4. Overtime is quite an experience.

5. Heh, there is overtime pay.

I’ve been at the food laboratory for almost 10 years and left last year. It’s surprising that so many people come and go at this company, yet there are so few reviews, so I’m providing a brief update on the company’s current situation for future junior colleagues~

When you join the food laboratory, you are assigned to a group first. The work environment varies greatly from group to group. The groups that frequently require overtime and weekend shifts are usually those handling government contracts. The Food Additives, Veterinary Drugs, and Pesticides groups are relatively busy; the other groups are more ordinary. Some groups have many long-term employees who teach newcomers by scolding them. If you feel that things are not right after joining, ask HR as soon as possible whether you can transfer to another group. In recent years, many people have transferred groups after joining. Personally, I think the only advantage is that department-level managers generally do not interfere much in personnel matters. You usually work directly with the team leader and colleagues. If you need to take leave unexpectedly, as long as staffing is sufficient, you can submit the request through the online leave system, and managers usually approve it directly. I really can’t think of any other advantages.

The only company larger than us in food testing nationwide is SGS, so there isn’t much to think about if you want to change jobs. Besides, there are only a handful of companies in the testing industry, and the salaries are all roughly the same. I’m not sure how much new hires are currently offered when they join, but in any case, annual raises here are only a few hundred dollars. Some colleagues who resigned and later rejoined were able to negotiate a larger increase than they would have received by staying here. The general impression is that the company treats employees who are willing to stay as easy targets; unless you endure long enough to get promoted, you may receive an extra 3–5K, but that opportunity is hard to come by. Every year, there is an additional month of salary paid in December. Other than that, there is only a performance bonus paid at the end of March, which in recent years has usually been around two months’ salary. When I first joined, I once received only one month’s performance bonus. As far as I know, everyone receives the same number of months in a given year. There is no year-end bonus, so you receive nothing before the Lunar New Year.

Benefits get worse every year. The travel bonus has fallen from the original 6,000 to 3,600. Apart from NT$1,000 for each of the three traditional holidays, the only other benefit is a NT$1,000 Shin Kong gift voucher for your birthday. The contracted provider for health checkups also gets worse every year; originally, checkups were provided annually, but since last year the company has said that, under the Labor Standards Act, they are only required once every three years.

Apart from the team leaders, no one has a designated workstation. You can only rest near the machines, and if you are seen, there are quite a few senior employees who dislike newcomers taking breaks and will make snide remarks about newcomers not being proactive. There is no seating for lunch, so you have to find an empty table yourself.

Whenever the company is short-staffed, it only hires newcomers. I have hardly ever seen anyone with experience join, so whenever a senior employee leaves, there is a long transition period. This is especially true in groups handling government contracts, where the number of weekend shifts increases. Weekend overtime pay is calculated according to the Labor Standards Act plus an allowance of a few hundred dollars.

Finally, I still want to advise recent graduates: if you want a high salary, don’t join this company and endure it. Don’t bring the school-lab mindset of learning more, doing more, and handling more instruments into this job. Even if you can operate all the advanced instruments and perform every experiment, your annual raise will still only be a few hundred dollars. You will merely go from being a newcomer to being a senior employee. When you try to change jobs, you may find that the only place you can go is another testing company. In the end, you will be stuck with a mediocre salary. (According to the annual income tax statement, total annual income is roughly NT$500–800K; for a non-managerial employee, reaching NT$1 million is basically impossible.) You will work overtime on weekends until your friends and family have no idea what you are busy with. Senior employees earning within this range usually complain about the company’s low pay and poor benefits while also complaining that newcomers are not proactive. (If everyone knows the benefits are poor, why expect newcomers to be proactive? They don’t leave themselves either—it’s extremely contradictory.)

No advantages whatsoever; you can go straight to the cons!

A fake foreign company in Taiwan wearing a wolf’s skin!

At its core, it is essentially run according to traditional Taiwanese business practices—without even getting into the unfair division of labor. A bunch of people do nothing during working hours while meddling in other people’s business and spouting nonsense, then wait until quitting time to dump 60–90 or more reports on others to process.

Were all 60–90 experiments conducted simultaneously?

You release 60–90 reports at once right before the end of the workday. Don’t other people get to leave work? Should we all compare our watches and schedules?

Your overtime, my clock-out—that’s the concept here.

The supervisor even says that reports received that day must be completed that same day.

Are you kidding me? Even if each report takes just one minute to process, that still means working 1.5 hours of overtime (and then they don’t pay overtime, claiming that you’re too inexperienced and therefore not allowed to report it).

Then you discover that the reports sent out earlier are riddled with errors, leaving everyone downstream to suffer!

So they have to be sent out immediately… while the department at the next stage has already left and disappeared.

Are we supposed to send them to the “good brothers” (ghosts)?

On top of that, the supervisor will absolutely let you experience hell: personal attacks and sarcastic remarks all day long! It is blatant workplace bullying!

When there are no reports or performance results, instead of asking the business side for them, they make the people downstream shoulder the responsibility, then tell you that you don’t meet the requirements during your probationary period! They rely on emotional blackmail all day. Someone like this becoming a supervisor must mean there was literally no one else available, right? Otherwise, tell me: how could someone with absolutely no management ability become a supervisor?

Another extremely unethical thing is that…

The supervisors at this company privately disclose everyone’s salaries—who earns more and who earns less! They even rummage through everyone’s drawers to see whether you have hidden anything????

Where is the privacy? Where is professional ethics?

If a supervisor does not even have this basic level of ethics, then this company must have been completely blind to hire such a person! These days, it could be called “the rule of incompetents”! Shameless people can conquer the world; the more useless they are, the more likely they are to rise to positions of power!

Equal work, unequal pay. Everyone’s educational background and experience are different! If you want equal pay for equal work, why not just hire interns and avoid even having to enroll them in labor and health insurance (saving money)?

The fact that I haven’t filed a complaint with the Ministry of Labor today already counts as being polite (I’ve kept all the evidence anyway). This has seriously violated employees’ most basic rights! The people at this company really need to reflect on themselves, and this should also serve as a warning to anyone planning to interview there! Better not go!

That’s all.

I resigned today. The job was with a third-party testing company, and my previous assignment was in a laboratory, so I thought I would be capable of doing this job. The supervisor gave me an offer the day after the interview. I thought every job had a honeymoon period, but this company had none! I also knew that testing companies were under a lot of pressure to meet deadlines, but I am still reluctant to leave. First, during the interview, they said I would be assigned to a certain group, but when I reported for work, they suddenly told me that I had been transferred to another group because of staffing reasons. I thought it was a new job anyway, so I accepted it. For the first two days, a female coworker trained me. After that, the supervisor asked a senior male coworker to train me. The sampling methods at this company are extremely bizarre. It was the first time in my life that I had encountered a method where you cannot make marks and have to collect samples by hand. The female coworker told me to learn slowly, and the other women also said to take my time—it wasn't something as simple as eating a meal. Fine. Back to the senior male coworker: because this company calculates how many items you complete each day, when the female coworker was training me, she would first select simple items for me to sample and then add a new sampling method each day. I also took notes.

But that male coworker directly gave me a work order with seven or eight different sampling requirements. I knew I needed to practice my speed, but I really couldn't work quickly with those bizarre sampling methods. If there were special samples, you also had to compare them, yet he gave all of that to me: multiple sampling methods, checking the samples, and each case required sampling at least five colors. Then one day, he took a work order written entirely in English and said, “You came back from overseas and worked abroad, so English shouldn't be a problem for you, right? Translate this work order for me.” (I thought, “Who do you think you are?”) Then, regarding the sampling tools, I had been using them from the age of 18 to 36. While I was sampling, he suddenly asked, “Is this your first time using this kind of tool?” (I had already rolled my eyes so far back they were practically at the back of my head.) When the supervisor was present, he would tell me to take my time and practice. Not long after the supervisor left, he asked me, “Why are you so slow?” Also, since this was a third-party testing company, your sampling had to be accurate. While I was matching the patterns, he asked, “What is your prescription? You can't even see this?” I replied that the supplier had requested something different. He said there was no such thing and that sampling his way would be fine. Fine—if you dared to guarantee it, I would do it that way.

Although all this pressure had only just begun, he had already pushed me to the point where I developed physical problems. Today, when I handled my resignation with HR, I honestly complained to her about his awful behavior. HR still gave me a very official response, saying they would investigate, and asked whether I had informed my direct supervisor. I said no, because this team is so small that if I complained, they would immediately know who I was talking about! HR then said, “There are many people like this in the workplace. Look, you've let him get his way again!” Since HR put it that way, presumably this person is a repeat offender, right?!

You can't do anything about the old-timers,

The supervisors are all younger than them,

So there's no use filing a complaint at all!

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The company is full of cockroaches. Even the useless people are just like cockroaches—loafing around every day, impossible to drive away and impossible to kill. All they do is shirk their responsibilities every day. Even when layoffs happen, those cockroaches never get cut. Don’t expect your salary to increase by more than 3,000 over five years. It’s full of cheap labor and preys on fresh university graduates. They even make things difficult for you when you resign. This fake foreign company is really only suitable for monkeys, because all it can afford to pay is bananas.

None at all

Terrible. The Small Appliances Department is terrible and does not value assistant engineers or sales assistants. HR has a bad attitude and is very difficult to deal with. They only spend heavily to hire highly paid executives, who are useless and only talk without taking action. They increase the workload without increasing salaries and specialize in deceiving fresh university graduates.

The author has worked as a technician in the Food Group on the 12th floor for about one year.

1. Overtime pay is provided generously.

2. There are quite a few women, including many attractive ones.

3. The boss is not very involved in day-to-day affairs.

4. Most supervisors are even more overworked than you, so there are no exploitative bosses or supervisors.

5. Technicians with university degrees have opportunities to advance to engineer after working for a few years.

6. The environment is clean.

7. Laboratory equipment is complete.

8. Overall, the department is reasonably well organized.

1. The sample volume is unstable; it often surges, requiring 3–4 hours or more of overtime.

2. The company is not very friendly to technicians. New hires start at 28,000, and there are not many benefits.

3. The division of labor is not very specialized. One person is often expected to do the work of two, handling a little of everything.

4. There are some unspoken rules. For example, after finishing their own group’s work, the night shift is expected to help other groups organize samples to build rapport.

5. Border-related samples often make weekend duty necessary.

6. Food near the workplace is expensive.

7. Filling vacancies is somewhat slow.

8. Overall turnover is relatively high; on average, one person leaves about every two months.

<Interview Experience Sharing—English Typist>

The office building in Neihu is almost entirely occupied by National Notary. Go to the 8th floor, where there is a reception desk, and wait in a small meeting room.

The HR representative conducts the first interview and asks very detailed and friendly questions about your previous work experience, taking notes while you speak.

(Before you even go to the interview, HR will print out the résumé you submitted and tell you that you don’t need to bring anything~)

They will also ask the basic reason for leaving your previous job.

All the benefits listed on 104 are provided. After three months, you get three days of annual leave, as well as additional flexible leave (including the original seven days, such as Constitution Day.

If all seven days in the year fall on weekdays, you get seven days of flexible leave and can arrange the days off yourself.)

Overtime is irregular. When I asked about the approximate frequency, they said 8–10 hours per month, but during busy periods it may last until 22:00.

There is a 30-minute dinner break in the evening, and overtime pay is calculated starting at 18:30.

After explaining the job duties, they had me take an English-to-Chinese translation test with two questions and a Chinese-to-English test with two questions. HR said to do my best and that it would not be too difficult.

There was also a personality test with 90 either-or questions.

At the end, they said they would contact me if there was news about a second interview. That was the end of the first interview.

~

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1. There are a large number of contract employees in the company earning NT$24K; even working overtime to death, it is difficult to break NT$30K.

2. After becoming a full-time employee, you only become a technician earning NT$28K? That's what I've heard from others—it's really extremely low-paid.

3. Some team managers have very poor leadership skills; a bunch of women spend all day inside chatting about gossip.

The HR representative had a good attitude and asked very clear questions about my past work experience. Even though it was in a different industry, they carefully asked about the details of my work and the nature of my position. I felt that the HR representative and/or manager had a very clear understanding of the hiring needs, providing a detailed description of the job responsibilities and the future development prospects of the position. Although I ultimately declined the offer, I still felt that it was a very pleasant interview experience.

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