Pros
I can't think of a single good reason why anyone should work at Supermicro—unless of course they enjoy constant stress and disappointment with the added bonus of culturally enforced denialism.
Cons
At Supermicro (SMC), you can experience the worst that Taiwan has to offer without getting your passport stamped. SMC’s headquarters (located in San Jose, CA) is a predominantly Taiwanese enclave where the English language is seldom spoken and almost never understood. This is a major problem for native English speakers that want to succeed at SMC, but it pales in comparison to the culture gap that is rigorously enforced by upper management (all of whom are Taiwanese/Chinese). The Chinese social concepts of face and guanxi are the two critical elements that determine success (including financial) or failure at SMC. You can study sociology and intercultural communication, but what the textbooks don’t say is that you, as a foreigner, essentially have no face. You can give face to others, but they will not respond in kind. Essentially, you are little more than a token used to interact with non-Chinese customers while making the company appear to be culturally diverse. This means that there is no chance for meaningful advancement or financial gain outside of the sales “organization”, but even there you will never have any real authority. With a market cap that has approached $2 billion (USD), SMC is still in most ways run like a family business. Everything has to be done manually by means of dozens of separate intranet services, and there is no proper infrastructure in place for remote employees to access them. Despite having staff capable of fixing this, SMC’s management clings to this obsolete and inefficient approach. There is no unifying company culture (unless you include steamed pork buns, mandatory groupthink sessions, and dinner boxes), but many employees are united to some extent by the pervasive atmosphere of despair. Unfortunately, shared hardship is not enough to secure lasting cooperation between departments. As a result, the crab mentality has taken over. Some of the restrooms (and office areas) have water damage, and neglected patches of drywall molder while management continues to line their pockets and look the other way. Employees are told several times a week in mandatory meetings that the level of growth is “not good enough” and that we need to “make more money.” If you take a break from these meetings to use the restroom, you are liable to find signs instructing employees not to stand on the toilet while defecating; apparently, these warnings are often ignored. Concrete floors, paper-thin carpeting, and flickering fluorescent lights are common elements in SMC’s office environment. Cheap, tasteless, and uncomfortable furniture and fixtures are also prevalent. Air conditioning systems fail constantly, and it often smells terrible. Other than this general squalor, there is little consistency between the buildings on SMC’s large campus. Constant shouting matches in Mandarin, downtrodden employees wandering around wearing medical masks, and the sounds of people spitting in their waste bins give the office environment the ambiance of a street market. This cacophony makes it nearly impossible to speak to customers from your desk, so you will find yourself desperately searching for a vacant conference room. The HR department at SMC is truly the bottom of the barrel (or crab bucket), so they can do nothing to enforce policies that would result in the professional office environment one would expect at an American technology company (e.g. SMC). There is no leadership at SMC—everyone (including department heads) is primarily concerned with predicting the CEO’s behavior. Unfortunately, most of them are in way over their head in regard to modern engineering, collaboration, business etiquette, and the constantly evolving technical aspects of the x86 server industry. Despite this, management stubbornly refuses to empower those that have proven themselves capable—a vast majority of department heads and product managers are “lifers” that are stumbling head first towards their own obsolescence.
