宏碁資訊服務股份有限公司

The hardware environment looks good, and the engineers have a very large workspace.

They have a very high opinion of themselves—extremely high!

I went to the interview and didn’t even see a glass of water; they didn’t even ask if I wanted one. First, they had me sit at a table in the lobby and write a test for an hour and a half. After I finished, they took me upstairs to a conference room and left me sitting there doing nothing. Even though the interview time had been arranged in advance, they still left me waiting there for 15 minutes without even coming by to explain what was going on. After 15 minutes, the manager finally showed up with a PM, saying they had been in a meeting (couldn’t you have scheduled it slightly earlier or later to avoid a conflict?).

He started by saying, “You know this is a staffing-agency position, right? You wouldn’t be our regular employee; you’d be working at Acer,” and then said things like, “There might also be a chance to transfer internally in the future,” as if Acer were some amazing company and I absolutely had to work there. Next, he picked up my résumé—which very obviously hadn’t been read before—and began flipping through it. After asking a few questions about my résumé, he hurriedly left (he didn’t even ask about my salary expectations), leaving me with the PM to ask me technical questions.

However, although the PM had a background as a software engineer, what he had studied previously was probably somewhat different from the position I was interviewing for (different programming languages and so on). As a result, he didn’t really understand what I was telling him. He also hadn’t been given the answers to the earlier test (was I writing it for nothing?), so he could only ask random questions based on the test paper. After making small talk for a couple of minutes, the interview ended.

Two and a half hours in total—may I ask where that most basic glass of water was?

Oh, right. The position I interviewed for would require overtime, and sometimes working overtime on holidays as well. The employees are all very “responsible” and willing to do this, so overtime won’t be reported or paid~

Anyway, this place has been put on my blacklist permanently. A company that’s far too self-important, perhaps…

Many activities, often with snacks or small gifts

The salary is very average, but there are always projects that can never be finished. Before one project is completed, you have to take on the next one. Everyone works overtime desperately. The manager is a nice person, but the workload is too heavy and requires excessive overtime. Overtime can only be exchanged for compensatory leave. Basically, the turnover rate is very high.

1. 15 days of fully paid sick leave, with no documentation required when taking sick leave

2. Travel subsidies and occasional gifts

3. Located on the same floor as Daan MRT Station

1. Monthly salary is below the industry standard

2. Slow salary increases and limited opportunities for promotion

3. Extremely lean staffing: RD = SA + PG, but compensation is at the PG level

4. Responsibilities and authority are unclear. Supervisors only require that someone do the work, without caring who does it. They use delegation of authority as an excuse to make lower-level employees carry out tasks, but when resulting problems arise, they still only tell lower-level employees to figure out how to handle them.

(e.g. i. For project maintenance scheduling, the PM tells the PG to plan the schedule.

ii. For cost estimation, the PM tells the SA to independently assess the total workdays for PM + SA + PG, then tells the SA to use Excel formulas to calculate the actual amount and report it directly to the user.

iii. The PM tells the SA to discuss requirements directly with the customer.

)

5. There is a very high chance of being required to support projects using different technologies (e.g. someone who writes C# is assigned to maintain a Java project).

6. When user requests arrive by email, most supervisors do not first review and digest the content; instead, they simply pass the users’ emails directly to subordinates to handle.

7. Department policy follows a “user comes first” model. Even when users propose many unreasonable requests, if you want to reject them, you still have to come up with another solution as a substitute. In effect, this means fully accepting the users’ requests.

8. System development has no specification documents. The PM only tells you to look at the old program and rewrite it.

9. Outdated technology, insufficient development resources, extremely poor version control, and extremely poor integration → resulting in numerous problems after the system goes live.

10. No unified development standards → resulting in many ticking time bombs left in the code by former employees who have since left the company.

11. Takes on projects for government agencies

Some supervisors are nice and very responsible.

If you are changing careers to the IT industry and graduated from a prestigious university, I personally suggest that you can stay at Acer; basically, the salary is much higher than elsewhere.

It is very obvious that men are worse off; this is the norm in the IT industry.

Promotions are too difficult; there are many people who have been here for 10 or 20 years and still have not been promoted.

One person supports multiple projects, and the technology is also very outdated.

If outsourced personnel or long-time employees slack off, other full-time employees have to clean up after them.

For full-time employees, the benefits are good, and the headquarters in Da’an is conveniently located. For contractors, there are no advantages.

People on Tianyancha all say Acer is a place to coast toward retirement, but I don't feel that way at all. Maybe they're referring to Acer's Xizhi location.

At least the benefits are good for full-time employees; there really aren't many advantages to joining as a contractor.

Government projects are both tedious and lengthy, and you don't learn much new technology from them.