TSMC

They can only put your money in front of you, but it might be less if you're good enough.

1. Managers don’t know the software and don’t understand how the program works properly.

2. No development chance for engineers to learn new technology and to improve work efficiency.

3. No career plan for engineers to help them grow; there are only many ARs (action requests) asking engineers to work very hard to fulfill user requirements.

4. Managers don’t care about your life; they only care about their reputation and performance with higher management. They even ask engineers to work very late to deliver what they want.

5. Still use Delphi 7 (yes, Delphi 7, not 8, 200X, XE, or 10), which should be retired today for reports and agents.

6. Very unstable middleware to the database. It’s written in Delphi 7 with DCOM. I don’t know how to criticize this point; it is very unbelievable to happen in a “software department.” Nowadays, it should be something written in Java, C#, or Go. Even Python might be faster and stabler than Delphi 7.

7. Every project comes and sunsets soon once it gets credits. They claim they resolve a lot of issues happening in the factory, but it won’t last too long because people need to accomplish another thing before the next performance evaluation, so their best strategy is to sunset the system they just delivered.

8. Although it’s CIM, the “data science” team is the most comfortable team to stay with because they don’t need to be on-call and don’t own programs that may cause product issues. Plus, they usually have good performance because their work can highlight people and make actual credit from that.

9. Don’t have system design meetings, code reviews, or endorsement meetings for publishing as a software department. Instead, you need to have a lot of signatures/approvals from users and managers to publish new programs in the production environment. Once issues happen, managers only care about the impact scope and ask you to fix it ASAP. They don’t want to be responsible for your work.

10. Engineers in CIM need to be multiple roles at the same time. You need to be RD, QA, DevOps, and PM by yourself because managers don’t show up in meetings with users, and you need to face them by yourself. They are only aware that you’re doing some projects when users are requesting something.

11. Unbalanced workloads between engineers. Performant engineers usually have a lot of applications to own. That is, you need to work from 8 AM to 10 PM for meetings, tracing bugs, and developing something new. However, engineers with lower productivity or a high chance to make mistakes don’t get work. They can just go to the office at 8:30 AM and leave at 5:30 PM. In total, bad money drives out good.

12. Sometimes, you may find CIM managers are just people with mouths and no real know-how to guide or help you in your work. They act like emotional animals to ask you to do anything they want. For example, one manager doesn't know how a function works in their project with energy statistics or Docker, but he always asks people to use these two things to complete projects, then he can get the credit.

13. Engineers need to share machines instead of having a PC for their own.

14. Good engineers are leaving one by one, and there are almost no good engineers left.

Please be responsible for your job and read some books to understand IT things.