If I had to say what the advantages of this job are, its Google Ads work places a strong emphasis on planning the initial structure, which is a good thing to learn.

If you love military life and enjoy writing Juguang diaries, you are welcome to join this company.

But if you like Juguang diaries, why not enlist? The pay for military service is far higher than this job's.

A very amusing company—a hybrid of a cram school and Military Online. One of the bosses runs a cram school, and the other is a career military officer who has left the service.

As far as I know, the management was completely replaced about a year and a half ago, which is when things became the way they are now.

There is three days of pre-employment training before you start, for which you receive NT$500 in travel expenses. These three days are like attending make-up classes at a cram school: you are made to watch videos nonstop.

On the first day, there is a video called “The Three-Part Formula for Office-Worker Success,” which takes about six hours to watch. The basic message is that you should throw yourself fanatically into your work, obey every instruction from your superiors, and proactively take responsibility. The speaker says things like he sleeps only four hours a day, reads reports until 2 a.m., and gets up at 6 a.m., but is very happy because he is a successful manager. Judging from his appearance, though, the presenter’s liver must already be completely ruined.

Every day you have to write notes and do assignments, which are submitted for inspection. On each of these three days, you have to read those spiritual-growth articles written by ghostwriters for self-satisfied old businessmen, then write reflections on your spiritual growth. Basically, it is a Juguang diary.

There are also all kinds of assignments, in enormous quantities—so much that you start wondering whether you are simply incompetent. For example, there is an assignment to write a keyword proposal with an absurdly large workload. The standard is that the number of ad groups should equal the daily budget divided by 50, with 20–25 keywords per group.

But once you actually go in and do keyword advertising, you realize it is completely impossible to write that many. For an ad with a daily budget of 3,000, am I supposed to create 60 ad groups, totaling 1,200 keywords? If you ask anyone at the company about this, they will be left speechless, because they know perfectly well that it is nonsense.

Later, I heard HR casually say, as though it were self-evident, “Everyone who passes the pre-employment training stays up until three or four in the morning during those three days.” That was when I realized the whole point was to put you through the wringer and see whether you were submissive enough.

If you make it through the pre-employment training, congratulations—you still have to spend anywhere from two to four weeks writing a huge number of proposals. At the same time, you will continue watching instructional videos every day, and every day you will be given spiritual-growth articles and told to write reflections about positive energy.

After you start working, you must write a daily work report every day, but you are not allowed to write it during work hours. Besides listing your regular daily tasks and plans for the next day, you also have to write meeting minutes, what you did best that day, how you can improve yourself each day, and “what you learned today.” Having to write what you learned today after a busy day of repetitive work is extremely painful. After finishing all that, you still have to write a “personal growth reflection” and a “communication and questions section.”

And you cannot write too little in the above sections. If you do, your supervisor will ask why you have no questions, whether you have not been studying seriously, and how they are supposed to help you. If you have no reflections, does that mean you have not put your heart into the work?

Even if you asked someone or looked up information during the day and found the answer to a problem, you are considered unserious if you did not write it in the questions section for your supervisor to see!

The “meeting minutes” in the daily work report are defined by the company’s management as including any conversation you have with any supervisor or senior colleague. The company’s managers say they will “compile everyone’s meeting minutes and send the complete version to everyone,” but of course that has never happened.

In addition, this company forces employees to hold book clubs. Once again, the books are spiritual-growth books ghostwritten for old entrepreneurs, telling you to work yourself to death and treat work as the meaning of life. They take place every two weeks, half an hour before work (unpaid, but your pay will be docked if you do not attend), and you also have to write a reading reflection. If you write too little, you will be criticized as well. The boss says that it is fine and that you can simply write a note saying you will not participate, but they will relentlessly mock you during the book club. Needless to say, you should not expect to be entrusted with important work either.

Recently, this has been suspended because the company moved. Otherwise, there was also an employee meeting every week, called an “optimization meeting.” Unfortunately, if the head of the optimization department is absent—she is basically the only person with digital-marketing expertise worth learning from—it becomes a rambling session by the two bosses, who can go on for an hour.

The company’s management staff mostly came from cram schools and are generally clueless about digital marketing. The boss who used to be a career military officer only tells you that you have to fight hard and you will succeed, and that you cannot imagine how hard his childhood was.

The cram-school-owner boss, meanwhile, is always saying that Taiwan is truly miserable and doomed, that young people in Taiwan only care about small comforts, and that Chinese young people have so much more “wolfishness,” with their astonishing digital and technology entrepreneurship. But while he was spouting all this, China’s internet bubble and the mass deaths of mobile services had already begun. Anyone who follows technology news would find it unbelievably stupid—how far behind is he? Is he still using pigeon packets?

Also, our main business is clearly Google Ads keyword advertising that cannot enter the Chinese market, yet he spends all day going to China to discuss partnerships. I have no idea what the hell he is trying to discuss.