串門子雲盟事業股份有限公司

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Sharing my experience of working for over a year at the Tainan branch in 2022:

There are Kaohsiung and Tainan offices.

Tainan office:

There is nowhere nearby selling food, so everyone orders delivery. They usually order breakfast or lunch boxes costing NT$120 or more, making the diet very unhealthy.

The boss discusses matters with the managers at noon, causing the managers to skip lunch and their break.

Rules for arriving at and leaving work:

1. After being late three times (within 10 minutes), you still receive the NT$600 full-attendance bonus.

2. Being 10 minutes late does not result in a deduction; you make up the time by extending your workday.

3. After being late more than four times (within 10 minutes), you do not receive the full-attendance bonus.

4. Being late more than 10 minutes even once means you do not receive the full-attendance bonus.

5. Being more than 10 minutes but less than 30 minutes late counts as half an hour of leave.

6. If you have annual leave available, you can use it for any leave request without losing the full-attendance bonus.

7. Taking eight hours of sick leave results in only half a day’s pay being deducted, while the full-attendance bonus is still paid.

8. Taking personal leave always means losing the full-attendance bonus.

A notice is posted beside the light switch in the Administrative Planning Office:

1. Working hours: 9:00–6:00

2. If the company requires overtime, you must cooperate.

3. Before working overtime, you must fill out an overtime form and have it signed by Chairman Chiu or “Chiu Mom.”

4. Handle things as much as possible during working hours. Do not use time after work, wasting company resources.

5. To request leave, you must fill out a leave form in advance and specify the type of leave (annual leave or sick leave). Sick leave requires a medical certificate.

6. NT$10 is deducted for each minute of lateness or early departure.

7. If you do not notify the company that you are taking leave, after 12:00 you do not need to clock in; it will be treated as an entire day of absence without leave.

8. We hope the business succeeds and everyone enjoys coming to work.

9. Even a small company needs small-scale management and systems.

串門子雲盟事業股份有限公司 2018.06.11

The boss walks extremely fast and also speaks very quickly. He does not understand technology.

The boss claims to be the owner of 碳佐麻里, but apparently is not.

Online, you can find 碳佐麻里國際事業有限公司,

address: No. 52, Guangzhou Road, Anping District, Tainan City,

business activities: wholesale of daily necessities, wholesale of cosmetics, international trade, general advertising services, and product design.

However, you can also find 碳佐麻里有限公司,

which is missing only the four characters “國際事業,”

address: No. 630, Section 2, Fuqian Road, Jianping Village, Anping District, Tainan City.

Business activity: restaurant.

The PM is the boss’s daughter. She also does not understand technology. She studies abroad and returns to help as a PM during winter and summer vacations.

The company develops a POS system using Go and Vue.

Two years ago, the company hired a gambling-industry engineer to develop the POS system. After developing it for two years, the engineer changed jobs and left behind a POS system written in the niche programming language Go, making it extremely difficult to find programmers afterward.

Because no one could maintain the system, the company hired that engineer as a consultant. They ask him whenever there is a problem and ask him to help interview candidates and recruit people to develop the system.

During interviews, they tell you that it does not matter if you do not know Go or Vue; you can learn after joining.

However, “learning after joining” means learning Go, Vue, the POS system’s business logic, and its database fields within two weeks, after which you are expected to start development.

The boss constantly pressures you about your progress.

The Tainan branch has:

1 director, 1 graphic designer, 1 salesperson, and 2 accountants.

The company takes on government projects, business-district marketing, medical aesthetics, and so on.

The boss only looks at the output, not the effort made along the way. He gives you an unreasonable deadline and then demands that you finish quickly. If you do not finish, it means you were not working.

The boss is very busy and is often absent from the office.

The Tainan company is on the first floor of a luxury residence,

and the boss’s home is on the second floor.

There are surveillance cameras all around the Tainan company office.

The boss watches employees’ every move through the cameras.

If you apply to work in Tainan, they require you to train at the Kaohsiung office for one week. They give you a MacBook Pro (you may not choose a Windows computer), set up your local development environment, and have you take the laptop back to Tainan to work. If there are problems, you contact them through messaging software.

Because only a small number of stores use the POS system and it frequently has problems, issues must be handled immediately. Therefore, when stores close their accounts at night or have problems on holidays, you must deal with them immediately. It is similar to on-call work, but there is no overtime pay.

The boss does not care what time it is. Whether it is 7:00 a.m., 9:00 p.m., or 10:00 a.m. on a holiday, he will send a Line message asking about work.

The coworkers at the Tainan office are very easy to get along with. The drawback is that you often encounter the boss.

If you are an engineer at the Tainan office, your seat will face away from the corridor, so anyone walking past can see your screen.

If you are an engineer at the Kaohsiung office, your seat will face away from the manager, so the manager can see your screen at any time.

The company-issued MacBook Pro with the M1 chip has many compatibility problems. Even the Kaohsiung engineers cannot set up the development environment. You have to Google solutions yourself, but the project is also rushing and you are not allowed to spend time Googling solutions.

At the Kaohsiung branch, employees must stay for half an hour after work every week to clean the office. The Tainan company has dedicated cleaning staff.

The boss only looks at output, not the effort made along the way. He gives you an unreasonable deadline and then demands that you finish quickly. If you do not finish, it means you were not working.

Even if you work hard after joining to learn Go and Vue, understand the POS system architecture and database fields, and promptly ask coworkers about anything you do not understand, failing to finish quickly means you did not work hard.

Because Go is so niche, none of the coworkers know Go when they join; they learn it afterward. Much of the system was developed by the former manager. No one knows why it was written that way—only the former manager who left knows—so you have to Google information yourself to understand it.

Discussions about new features involve the PM, the boss, and the Tainan manager sitting next to the manager in the Tainan office and talking past one another. I wondered why they did not use a whiteboard to draw out and discuss their ideas.

There is no software engineering; they use “Agile software development.”

The boss is extremely rushed in everything he does. When renovating a storefront (麵聚館), a typhoon caused a holiday, but he told the design company to go to the storefront and inspect it during the typhoon.

The design company explained that its employees were off due to the typhoon and that going outside during a typhoon was dangerous, but the boss insisted that they inspect the site.

As a result, the design company refunded the fee and declined to take the project.

According to the Git history, development of the POS system appears to have begun in April 2020. The history shows how many people have come and gone.

During interviews, the boss repeatedly emphasizes that he is the owner of 碳佐麻里. He says that because restaurant salaries have an upper limit, he decided to branch out on his own. He repeatedly emphasizes plans to open new branches and says the store rent is NT$60 million. He emphasizes that developing the POS system has already cost NT$100 million.

Questionnaire to complete during the interview:

1. What does the company do?

2. Do you have experience participating in clubs or organizations?

3. Are you willing to cooperate with overtime work?

4. If you are transferred to another position, are you willing to cooperate?

Q: Please introduce yourself, for approximately three minutes.

Q: Why did you leave your previous job?

If you answer that you worked overtime too often, you may be criticized. The boss may say, “So are you preparing to come here to retire?”

They claim to use Agile software development, but in reality it is fake Agile.

Only the development speed is agile; none of the other practices that should be part of Agile software development are carried out.

The boss goes out to do sales and is often absent from the office.

Another female salesperson is also often absent from the office.

On your first day, you must sign a contract. If you violate certain provisions, you must pay NT$30 million in damages, and the Tainan District Court is designated as the primary court.

There is a non-compete clause. After leaving, you may not work for upstream, downstream, or similar companies.

Kaohsiung office:

The Kaohsiung office consists entirely of engineers:

1 manager, 3 full-stack developers, 1 Android developer, 1 UI/UX designer, and 1 DevOps engineer.

There are snacks, but they look like the cheap snacks bought for a traditional religious ceremony and are scattered around on the tables.

There are surveillance cameras installed in all four corners of the office.

The Kaohsiung office is on the second floor of a café. There is an abandoned bar counter. For the snack area, employees shop online at Carrefour and choose the snacks they want, but there is a spending limit, so they can only choose cheap, unhealthy snacks. The office used to be an Aidoumei catering classroom?

The Kaohsiung manager is a retired soldier. In the military, he wrote Classic ASP. He had been with the company for two years, and when the previous manager left, he was promoted to manager. He is mainly responsible for ordering-machine hardware.

Vue training method:

While knowing absolutely nothing about Vue, you are asked to fix a small bug. After finding the file containing the bug, you discover that the file imports another file. After finding the imported file, you discover that it imports yet another file. Once you find that file, you are asked to modify it, which causes a bug in the file before the previous one.

This learning method is very stimulating because you have no idea what the code means or what you are doing.

Go training method:

While knowing absolutely nothing about Go, you are asked to use Go + Vue to print the join results of two database tables, with pagination, within one week. You are then asked to modify a subfeature of the POS system using it as a reference example.

This learning method is very stimulating because you have no idea what the code means or what you are doing. You simply imitate the existing code, change the original variable names to new ones, change the original filenames to new ones, and stumble through until the task is complete. Then you still have no idea why the program runs or why the code needs to be written that way.