Disclaimer: I am from the Software department, and I am NOT speaking for other departments because I am clueless on what happens outside of the Software dept. If you are a software engineer, tester or manager looking into Bridgetek, please read this beforehand.
I have worked in this company long enough to see all the software engineers, testers and managers in Singapore and Vietnam forced to leave after a very short time, because the upper management is very focused with results on paper but do not care at all for the people.
It was a nightmare for everyone in the software department, because this company's core foundation is at hardware design and manufacturing (semiconductor), and it is apparent that they are clueless at IT.
Most of the employee's consensus: the company portrays the image that they do not care about or trust their people. There are no measures in place to boost individual productivity, which frustrates all the competent talents in this department. There is too much restrictions and too little support. Almost every single 'process' that is implemented to 'make the product better', is a detrimental to our individual productivity.
A few things just to paint you the picture:
1. All developers have to go through a painful 3-4 hours weekly meeting where the manager or director basically just talks to individual persons one at a time on their progress, when there are up to 20 other people just waiting. Naturally, people get switched off during the meeting to do their own work, and when they are called by name all of a sudden, they request to repeat what was being said, and such a negative feedback loop that wastes so much of everyone's time.
2. Many developers must carry a big and heavy CPU, to and fro office every week to work home on alternate weeks. We do not have admin rights to our personal workstations, so installing anything (from web or from the command prompt) requires us to submit for approval from management. Yes you can imagine.
3. We are not allowed to use github and are forced to use SVN to work with our team in Singapore and Vietnam for a funny reason such as, only SVN can be stored in company local server, and github does not support that.
4. We need to use redmine instead of JIRA also for funny reason such as, redmine is a company-level software so we must adhere to it even though it is not practical for software side to use.
5. Speaking of redmine and JIRA brings me to this. We were using V-model / waterfall instead of agile methodology. Just imagine the V-model, used by in-house development teams for products that have multiple iterations and releases over the long-term!! When new competent managers came to the company, they wanted to transit us to agile (no brainer) but the upper management was too used to old format and were reluctant to change to agile.
It was painful as one of the past managers was trying to introduce JIRA (no brainer), and in that few months, all of us we had to maintain tickets and our progress in BOTH redmine and JIRA. Also, we have to submit weekly reports in one Excel workbook per person, which is unnecessary if we already have tracking platform like Redmine or JIRA. Triple-work for the comfort of the clueless management team.
6. Few colleagues share that their boss is very upset with them for applying for leaves on important occasions and taking medical leave, which are entitlement. No evidence to back up, but the story is consistent amongst few individuals.
7. Expected to work FULL day on days like Christmas Eve, and Chinese New Year Eve (for everyone). Also, everyone has to use their card to tap in and tap out to clock hours in the office for attendance and punctuality tracking.
The company was very reluctant to pay for individual subscriptions like JIRA, Git, that only cost just less than $10 a month, but would really boost productivity of individuals and teams but they just dont care. In fact, managers tried to push for certain software subscription and it took months before the upper management gets convinced and approve. Company was very willing to spend thousands of dollars to pay for SonarCube monthly subscription to improve our product, but very reluctant to spending a few dollars on individual subscription..
New Managers from the IT sector with decades of experience were hired to manage the product teams, but they suffer a lot because as they were trying to guide the upper management on software industry's best practices, they get resistance and reluctance of change.
No culture, no values. No vision, no direction, no goal, no inspiration, no motivation from the top, down. Everyone at the lower levels of the hierarchy feels it. And we have ever-changing product roadmap and requirements based on the mood of the big boss and not based on user research or at least some tangible data.
Lastly, someone has been fabricating fake 5-star reviews on Bridgetek Glassdoor Page. One obvious example, there was only 1 IOS senior dev who left in Jan, 2022. I have confirmed that the person did not post any review on Glassdoor, or it wasnt the person who did that post. Easy to find out, because that person was the ONLY senior IOS dev left in SG.
On the pay grade and benefits, needless to say, they are not great. They have been trying to improve it, but the pace is too slow. I am really puzzled by this. It seems like the management recognize that there is a big fire spreading, and they still are dragging their feet to reach the fire hose!!!
It feels to us this department a sinking ship, with everyone either has left or is looking out for opportunities already, and for those people that left, there is no successful replacements since last year, in both SG and Vietnam. Look at this entire situation, it is sad, considering how far the software projects have come. Despite the mismanagement of talents, there were still many hours put in by countless talents who come and go over the years.
The upper management has amusingly been trying to blame their high employee turnover on things that are out of their control. The market conditions and the general labor crunch in the tech industry. But they forgot that in hardware manufacturing, there are raw materials and patents in play, but in IT and software, the PEOPLE are your raw materials, labor, and your everything. How you treat your people is how outside people will look at you.
Many Vietnam colleagues share the same sentiments with us, although theirs might include different things, but everyone in general are just really frustrated to stay working here.
