The best department in the entire company is the Engineering Department. The manager is a senior engineer from Salesforce in the United States: clear-minded, reasonable, and humble. It’s hard to say the same about the other departments, but on the surface, the atmosphere of collaboration across the company is good.

This is a company that does not conduct market research or look at the numbers before making decisions. Whoever is the loudest wins. The founder is unwilling to admit their own mistakes, decision-making information is not transparent, and most of the resources are poured into the Marketing Department. Every week, employees are brainwashed into believing that this is an R&D-focused, product-building company, but the Marketing Department always has more people than the Product Department. This may have something to do with the dynamics and power struggles between the company and its founders. In short, it is a marketing-focused company—especially when it comes to advertising, where the cost-effectiveness is extremely low and money is spent very recklessly (probably twice as much as companies of a similar size). Setting extremely low standards and then always meeting them—what’s the point? All they do is build the brand and place ads, without even conducting the most basic market research. Treating a startup like Procter & Gamble and marketing it this way is absolutely baffling. The founder’s brainwashing is basically: believers will always believe, while nonbelievers find it disgusting. (Anyway, the long-term employees have all been pushed out, and fewer and fewer people know about the company’s troubled history. Maybe, by the end, everyone left at the company will be someone who has been brainwashed.)

The company also never thinks through contingency measures before making any decision. Previously, it laid off multiple mid-level managers without warning and had not properly arranged any supporting measures. In the end, the employees who remained simply had more and more miscellaneous work to handle, while management kept shouting that the company needed to break even (well, of course—that’s because you laid off all those people~). Although the company claims to hold regular one-on-one meetings, they are really just opportunities for the boss to talk about how high the company’s “dream-to-capital ratio” is (that is, the ratio between its ambitions and its capital). The improvements employees hope for are never genuinely heard. The company is completely unable to retain employees who are willing to fight hard for it. When I first joined, I felt that everything was full of promise, but after working there for a while, I felt that my heart was willing but my abilities were insufficient. The pace of change is extremely slow. It’s truly a shame.