網際威信股份有限公司 內湖科

Flexible working hours and little overtime

If you’re thinking of applying for the customer service position, think twice.

During the interview, they say there are additional bonuses,

but after joining, you find out they’re only there to look at, not receive.

On the surface, the role is described as customer service, but in reality, it involves both administrative assistance and customer service.

There is absolutely no structure to the training.

They just have a former customer service colleague teach you in a casual, slapdash way.

They refuse to acknowledge their own mistakes, and their attitude is poor.

They have absolutely no respect for people. Most importantly, the supervisor still treats and praises them as if they were invaluable.

If you really want to know about this company’s hiring practices:

You later find out that the reason is that the upper management sets a bad example, so those below follow suit.

The supervisor is so outrageous that she looks at websites selling children’s products during work hours,

and you can often hear her clipping her nails when things are busy.

She also often takes leave without informing anyone…

If you’re under no financial pressure and want to challenge your stress tolerance, give it a try!

Flexible working hours; even when colleagues are very late, management acts as if nothing happened.

Promotions are entirely dependent on the manager’s mood, and so are raises. A raise is usually only around 2,000, and it isn’t even given every year. During the interview, they made it sound like there was a well-established system, but that also depends on the manager’s mood. Knowing how to flatter the higher-ups is genuinely very important. The project-planning ability of upper management gets worse year after year, and several new projects have been taken on at a loss, while also reducing everyone’s year-end bonus.

In previous years, if you worked overtime, they were fairly proactive about paying overtime. But this year, they are rather unwilling to pay it. When asking people to work overtime, they put on one face; when it is actually time to pay the overtime, they put on a completely different face.

In recent years, the workload has kept increasing while annual salaries have kept decreasing. Every year they promise grand things, but in the end it always turns out differently. Also, they cannot retain experienced employees, because upper management sacrifices senior employees’ rights and benefits in order to retain new hires. In short, staying for a year or two is still okay, but if you draw the short straw year after year, that’s another story...

No clocking in required.

Overall, things were okay when I first joined. Ever since she became the manager, there’s nothing left but drawbacks.

There are too many… The company benefits actually aren’t bad.

It really is this manager… She ruined everything :(

The manager likes clipping her nails at work, is very fond of currying favor with a subordinate (the only one with connections), pretends to be working from home while going out to have fun, uses threatening language when subordinates ask for leave, constantly spreads false rumors, looks down on other people’s appearances—she has every possible flaw a manager could have!

And I’m too lazy to type any more about her.

I just want to tell everyone: choose your department carefully!!

There are quite a lot of people, so work can be shared among everyone.

The company is willing to hire young people and newcomers changing careers.

There is no need to clock in. The air conditioning should be fairly cool.

The company is not particularly generous; the starting salary is lower than that of other companies in the same industry.

The actual number of employees is not as high as stated on the job websites. I estimate that many people have left.

The company is basically a typical old-fashioned Taiwanese company, so you can imagine what the various rules are like.

HR also seems to make mistakes quite often. When giving me the offer, they only said that basically everything that should be provided would be provided. In reality, even during the three major festivals, there is not so much as a small gift.

The company imitates foreign companies by holding happy hours, but they are only held once a month. (I thought foreign companies held them at least once a week.)

Moreover, the food and drinks purchased for happy hour are paid for with money deducted from your monthly salary. (It feels like the amount deducted is far greater than the cost of the food.)

What about the snack cabinet? The company only buys ten-dollar packets of snacks—I thought I had gone back to middle school. There are very few, and even when they are restocked in the morning, they are usually all taken before noon.

The managers and bosses really like to watch what employees are doing. During the flexible working hours from 9:00 to 9:30 a.m. (if you arrive at 9:30, you leave at 6:30 p.m.), the boss announced that eating at your desk is not allowed after 9:00. They also frequently walk around to check whether each employee’s screen is related to work.

Recently, employees have been testing positive one after another. The company sent a message saying that isolation is no longer required. Therefore, if you test positive, feel unwell, and want to take five days of sick leave, you have to go to the hospital and obtain a medical certificate on all five days in order to take sick leave. (When you test positive, it is so painful that even getting out of bed is difficult—you really feel like you are about to die.)

Then, employees who test positive and come to work are seated in corner positions, but they can still basically walk around and eat at their desks. (Are they trying to get the entire staff infected once?)

During the interview, they said someone would train you. In reality, on your first day, they just throw a project at you and tell you to figure it out yourself.

They say there is training? Sometimes there is, but it is not necessarily useful for the job. It takes place after working hours, and you cannot claim overtime.

After passing the probation period, there is absolutely no additional allowance of any kind. They also tell you that salary adjustments are made only once a year. HR initially said that they would discuss it with the supervisor after I completed probation, but there was no follow-up at all. HR is often nowhere to be found. In the information they initially provided for opening a company account, they even managed to mistype the English name.

Equal work for unequal pay: you may negotiate a lower salary than the person next to you even though you have the same workload.

They say bonuses depend on performance, but they do not actually explain how they are calculated, nor do they tell you how your performance is rated. (I have not received any bonus yet.)

Some managers have extremely bad personalities. I saw a newcomer being called to the manager’s desk every day and berated for more than an hour. It sounded like nothing more than a communication problem, yet the newcomer was scolded for an entire month—called over every day to be berated—and eventually left after a month.

In short, the salary is like that of a civil servant with no benefits. The various bonuses listed on the job websites are completely unreliable. At least compared with other companies in the same industry, this company has very few benefits. If you want a place to coast until retirement, I suggest finding a company where there are at least a few benefits to take advantage of!

* No clocking in required

* As long as you have no shame and aren't afraid of being yelled at, you can live pretty comfortably

* You can stay for two years and then jump to a bank; it's a decent stepping stone for beginners

* The right department is heaven; the wrong department is hell

* The boss is both stingy and wants to look grand. From various events to the year-end banquet, everything gives off a tacky, poverty-stricken attempt at grandeur.

* The gifts for the three major holidays are all the boss's wife's “Zhewei” gift boxes. At the year-end banquet, if you want more chances to win prizes, you have to buy the boss's wife's gift boxes to help her meet sales targets in exchange for raffle tickets; otherwise, you'll miss out on half of the raffle time.

* The work is all programming and the difficulty isn't much different, but salaries vary by department. Some departments simply have higher starting salaries. If you join the wrong department, not only are you out of luck, you can forget about promotion too.

* The company's promotion system is a complete mess and depends entirely on the mood of those above. Suck up to the right lazy jerk and you'll get promoted year after year. Skipping over a department director to become a division director isn't a dream. Some people are incompetent and love taking credit, causing a wave of resignations in their department, yet they can still keep rising through the ranks—their official careers just keep rolling along.

* The salary structure is low base pay with high bonuses. Although people have made more money in recent years, year-end bonuses haven't increased proportionally. If the company earns slightly less in a given year... those who know, know. Simply put, it lacks the explosive upside this kind of salary structure should have, and the risk-reward ratio is poor. If you really like this kind of structure, you might as well go work at a bank.

* Here's a little hint: after joining, observe the ratio of RDs, SAs, and PMs in your department. If the PM-to-RD ratio is strange and almost all the RDs have been there for less than two or three years, congratulations—you've landed in the worst department. Run while you can.

Convenient transportation to the location

For reference, here are the questions from the company’s personnel information form before the interview:

Family situation: members, names, education levels, places of employment, whether you support them, and whether you live together

Have you been hospitalized within the past three years?

How much do you agree with the following statement: My cooperation is excellent, and I will definitely cooperate with the project schedule and adjust my personal routine accordingly.

□ Completely agree □ Strongly agree □ Agree □ Disagree □ Strongly disagree □ Completely disagree

Approximately how much do you need for living expenses per month (NT$)?

If you do not fill it out, you will be asked about it again during the interview.

The company is still fairly new

Can't think of anything

Not much overtime

Older managers or veteran sales staff have a lot of free time. They will secretly look at what you are doing on your screen and then snitch to management, so many people install privacy screen protectors on their computers. The company does not provide a desktop computer or laptop for you to use, so you have to bring your own. The ironic part is that the work requires a high level of confidentiality, yet the company does not provide the equipment.

The software needed for work is something you have to obtain yourself. The company does not want to pay for licensed software, and you will start getting nagged if you leave your seat for more than five minutes.

The interview questions aren’t difficult

There isn’t much need to work overtime

The salary is much lower than at typical tech companies. Engineers with more than 2 years of experience

are only offered a junior R&D salary in the low NT$40,000s

Lack of communication among colleagues

Cliques and exclusion

In the internal medicine office, you can basically leave work on time at 6 p.m.; by 7 p.m., pretty much everyone has left.