五倍紅寶石股份有限公司

Many colleagues at the company are highly capable and strongly submissive, making for a good peer environment overall.

Although the company bills clients based on assigning multiple projects to one person, it simultaneously assigns engineers to projects for different clients.

When clients complain that progress is slower than estimated, the company then tells them that their budgets are too low, resulting in insufficient staffing, and asks them to increase their budget and manpower.

Yet even while exploiting clients in this way, the company frequently cites lower-than-expected revenue as the reason for giving everyone only 0.3 or 0.5 months’ worth of year-end bonus. It seems to have spent all its income renovating the office. No wonder all the capable engineers have left.

I can't think of anything.

The main sources of trouble at this company are these four people. If you are lucky enough to join this company, you will quickly learn exactly who A, B, C, and D refer to below.

A

1. Most projects fall under B's responsibility as the technical lead. If you happen to be assigned to one of his projects, you need to be mentally prepared. Why?

1-1 A himself does not have much technical knowledge, so he has to ask B about any slightly complicated technical issue. Here's the problem: in terms of rank, B should be junior to A, but because B has the technical expertise, he can decide based on his mood whether or not to respond to A. Naturally, the work gets held up.

1-2 A master at passing the buck. Sometimes a project is urgent or there are special circumstances requiring his support. His reflex, however, is to push it off onto someone else first, and only reluctantly take it on when he truly cannot avoid it. What happens next is another interesting matter: his ability to understand things. His thought process can always lead him to interpret things in a way that nobody else could possibly have misunderstood, and then he comments on how you should write this or that.

1-3 Does review equal no review? I believe all the RDs know about the great system called Code Review. The original purpose of this requirement was genuinely good: to properly scrutinize junior RDs' code and rigorously ensure its quality. But when it is his turn to review, if you are an RD, you will wonder: “Shouldn't this be changed? How did this even pass? ==” If you are a PM, after testing, another bug will appear, and you will have to assign someone else to clean up the mess.

2 The above are mainly his shortcomings as a technical lead. But what if he did not have this particular role? He is normally required to attend kickoffs, but whenever he attends a meeting, whether with employees or clients, everyone is left with a baffled expression.

2-1 Disappearing during meetings. If he attends, his mic is basically muted the entire time while he works on his own things, leaving even the client confused. Then there is the question of the project's value. If the project does not appear to be worth much money, he leaves halfway through—gracefully leaving halfway through.

2-2 Based on the above, you might think he is a very busy person. But when it is a small meeting that does not require him to attend, he will quietly join halfway through. When you have often been unable to get help internally and have been made the scapegoat, so you have built a fairly familiar relationship with a client and are less formal with them, he will privately message you during the meeting to say that you are being very rude. Which is ruder: dodging the client's questions, or responding directly in a somewhat friendly tone because you have a close relationship with the client? We may never know.

3 This company places great emphasis on so-called openness and transparency. Yet when you raise a technical issue or a client-related problem in the public channel—the group containing everyone on the project—it generally goes unanswered for a very long time. The strange thing is that if, over some trivial matter, such as posting an incident in the wrong category because the company has a huge number of groups with absolutely no consistent rules, you happen to post in the wrong group, A, B, C, and D will swarm in at an unbelievable speed, acting as if they have nothing else to do, and verbally tear you to shreds in the thread. Why is this specifically attributed to A? Because he has a particular trait: after a long while, he will tag you again and add another round of criticism. (Possibly after he has finished browsing group-buying deals and some anime-related content and has nothing else to do. This is only a possibility—just speculation; I cannot establish any actual causal relationship.)

B

After going on at length about A, it is time to talk about B. How should I describe him? To sum it up in one sentence: “Everyone here is an idiot.” Yes, he considers even the people above him to be idiots. He frequently attends technical discussion events, and people who follow technical forums in the video-game industry should not be unfamiliar with him. In short, when dealing with someone like him, you need to lower your self-respect—or whatever you want to call it—as far as possible, and beg or ask him for advice in the most humble way you can. Most of your problems can then be resolved. Sometimes, however, you still encounter situations like A's, where he delivers a post hoc criticism. RDs may think: “Do you have Asperger's syndrome or something...?” PMs, meanwhile, may be pushed to the point of developing depressive symptoms. After reading the introductions to A and B, you should understand the only way to survive as a PM at this company: do your utmost to be a messenger. Do not have ideas that are too far-reaching, or try to suggest any improvements. Do not be fooled during the interview, either. Of course, good ideas are always welcome—when have they ever not been?

C

The next person is even more bizarre. She was parachuted in from outside. I remember that last year there was a major questionnaire survey, with some of the bizarre questions you might have answered in middle or elementary school, such as: “Use several adjectives to describe Five.” Anyone who wrote their genuine thoughts was simply foolish. After the questionnaire, she initiated some sweeping policies, and employees began fleeing in an avalanche, from after the Lunar New Year until recently. I will not go into detail here about exactly what disastrous policies were introduced. Strange—wouldn't policies be revised in response to these results? No. Because she was parachuted in, she can do whatever she wants. Most people at the company do not actually know what this person's responsibilities are supposed to be. They roughly know that every month she reports on how powerful and promising the company is, and which newspaper has written an unpaid article for the company, and so on. There are projects, sure—but what kind of impressive projects? Go in and see for yourself. Do not be fooled by the case studies on the official website; those are projects from before the company split from the educational institution. Also, this company really likes to invite people to “talk, talk.” After B talks to you, C will ask to talk to you, supposedly to show concern for your work situation. But they only listen; they do not change anything. There is nothing the company needs to change. The only person who needs to change is you. If you do not change, you will continue to fail. On the surface, there is not even a single article on Glassdoor, and the salary comparison is neither particularly attractive nor particularly painful. This company really does look like a place worth trying. Their PR is genuinely quite good. Those patient enough to read this far—and those without LinkedIn—should create a LinkedIn account. Everyone who has left this company is highly capable, and they will be happy to share more with you. Real PR is not about how big your advertisements are or how good your marketing is. Please treat every employee you have encountered well; they are all the hidden negative-marketing agents you have overlooked.

D

There is not much that needs to be said about this person. At the moment, I can only think of A's

third point, to which she also contributed considerably.

That's all. Although this may look like a fairly lighthearted piece of writing, every day was an ordeal. Every day, people were tormented to the point of developing mental-health problems, and there was more than one victim.