Workplace reviews and discussion: UIUX_Cafe_碩太網路有限公司

1. No need to clock in, and working hours are flexible

2. Almost everyone, including the boss, is a designer, so there are more shared topics of conversation

3. All the colleagues are very nice

= Introduction =

Before discussing the shortcomings, I’ll first describe my situation at this company at the time. This company was established around July 2016 (I’m not entirely sure, but it should be about right), and I joined in October, so I was one of the company’s very early employees. At that time, there were only four people in the entire company, including the boss.

At the time, the company’s primary business was taking on client projects, including website redesigns for traditional industries and product design for startups. The company was also a coworking space, holding reading groups on weekday evenings and various workshops on weekends.

Speaking of taking on client projects, it is necessary to mention the company’s early business model. The boss never told external parties or interviewees that the company was “taking on outsourced projects.” Instead, he came up with the term “deep outsourcing,” meaning: “You come here to work, but you are not an employee here. You are an employee of the client company who is simply stationed here. Therefore, you must think of yourself as an employee of the client company and work with the mindset that you are building your own product.”

It sounds quite extraordinary. The outsourcing fees were calculated per person. For example, if one project was assigned one designer, the client would provide a monthly budget of NT$50,000, and UIUX Cafe would pay the designer NT$30,000. The difference was the profit, although of course the boss would not tell you how much the client was actually paying.

Naive and inexperienced at the time, I simply continued working under this arrangement. However, it easily created a problem: clients who paid more (such as large traditional-industry companies) would be allocated more manpower, while the designer assigned to a startup project (me) was very unlucky. Because the budget was smaller, I had to do everything alone (UI, UX, and even front-end development). From a designer’s perspective, the allocation of resources was severely unequal.

= My personal experiences at the time =

1. The interview process was extremely casual. The boss would paint an overly rosy picture of the company’s future ambitions, such as creating a salary-transparent work environment and helping improve designers’ professional abilities. However, when asked about the specific job responsibilities, he was extremely vague. That said, I also have to take responsibility for not thinking things through clearly enough before agreeing to work there.

2. Although the boss himself came from a design background, he was extremely business-oriented. At first, he told employees that we were doing “deep outsourcing” and that everyone should treat the product as “their own product.” We were also supposedly allowed to communicate directly with the client’s team.

In reality, we were simply a typical outsourced-project company. We received UIUX Cafe’s salary, not the client company’s benefits. Even when clients made unreasonable requests or proposed bizarre schedules, the boss would not protect the employees at all. He agreed to every request and told us to do it first and worry about it later. If we tried to discuss the difficulty of carrying out the requirements during meetings, the boss would often stop us, saying: “We need to make the client feel that we are professional and can do anything.” He never assessed feasibility or available resources; he simply expected everyone to proceed, which ultimately left the projects in complete chaos.

3. The boss was simultaneously the salesperson and PM for multiple projects. However, because he was constantly attending meetings and handling other business, he hardly did any of the things a PM should do, such as project management or coordinating resources. He would only show up at meetings to make a last-minute intervention. When it came to the client’s requirements, he often knew nothing, so it was practically a case of leaving the designers to fend for themselves.

4. The boss did not value his commitments. After a month, he went back on the salary we had originally agreed upon and required employees to do more “extra work” before he was willing to pay the salary he had promised. He also advertised externally that everyone would receive a salary of NT$40,000, yet at the time, no employee in the entire company reached that figure.

5. Almost all the employees were inexperienced designers who had recently graduated or had about one year of work experience, yet they were responsible for relatively complex projects. As mentioned earlier, the boss was always busy (although I honestly did not know what he was busy with) and had even less time to train new employees. When they encountered problems, he did not teach them how to solve or think through them. He only told them to “look at more of other people’s work” and “prepare a few more styles to show the client” (which felt more like being a production artist).

6. The boss loved painting overly rosy pictures and talking about vague ideals. At the beginning, he said his mission was to improve designers’ working environment, introduce systematic design processes, and increase designers’ influence. He even said that the following year he would take everyone to Silicon Valley and give everyone salaries above market rates, among other promises.

In reality, after I joined, there was no such thing as a work process. Every so often, he would give motivational speeches urging everyone to work harder. He also told us that salaries would eventually become transparent for everyone and hoped that everyone could quickly reach a salary level of NT$80,000. (The boss used this slogan in his external promotion, but in practice he only paid employees a little over NT$30,000, and salaries were still extremely opaque.)

7. The boss loved playing office politics and frequently asked people to have private discussions with him. However, these conversations were often not about work. Either he would say that he hoped you would take on more responsibility and then he would give you a raise, or he would gossip about other employees, saying that someone was not working hard enough or that he wanted to fire someone. This seriously affected the working atmosphere. (In my opinion, if an employee has a problem, the boss should communicate directly with that employee rather than complain to other employees.)

8. The boss frequently required employees to use their off-hours to do many extra tasks, such as leading reading groups after work, writing articles under the company’s name, learning software independently, planning courses, and leading workshops. The compensation offered was extremely unreasonable.

9. The boss had strong personal biases but often did not explain his reasons. If he liked you, everything was fine; if he did not trust you, nothing was acceptable. Whether in design or hiring and personnel decisions, he made almost everything according to his personal preferences.

10. The boss’s behavior contradicted what he said. He often asked everyone for their opinions and told us to raise any problems. In reality, whenever someone actually made a suggestion or proposed improvements to the company’s systems, it was met with silence and never implemented. In the end, decisions were still made according to his personal preferences.

11. In the early days, there were few employees, and the boss liked everyone to go out for meals together. However, he thought eating was a waste of time and wanted everyone to finish quickly and return to work, so he always walked very fast. I personally consider meals a time to relax and walked slowly. He actually seriously told me to walk faster and not chat with the others, which was completely baffling.

12. The team was too homogeneous: everyone was a designer. This created certain blind spots in our thinking, and for designers who were new to the industry, it could also make it difficult to gain experience working with people in other technical roles.

13. The boss liked to pass negative energy on to employees. He often repeated things like, “Being a boss is very stressful. You need to work harder and become stronger quickly.” However, he did not hire senior designers to mentor newcomers or provide practical resources for employees to learn from.

14. The turnover rate was very high. Within a year of the company’s founding, many people had already left. In addition to voluntary resignations, the boss would even dismiss employees without warning. He promised someone a one-month probationary period, but then decided within two weeks that the person was unsuitable and sent them away without explaining a clear reason.

15. He once secretly looked at employees’ private messages, making the atmosphere in the office extremely strange.

16. The boss liked to promote the idea that everyone in the company was one team and that we were partners. However, other employees were completely unaware when he interviewed new hires. A new colleague would often suddenly appear the next day, and we would immediately be expected to work with them. In addition, during interviews, the boss did not explain things clearly. Many new employees did not even know their benefits (salary, or whether labor and health insurance were provided) before being asked to come in for a one-month trial.

17. The boss liked to promote the idea that “clients are not enemies and all of their needs should be met.” As a design services company, there was very little room for discussion, and he did not care whether resources were sufficient or whether something was practical to execute. If the client had a request, we were simply expected to do it.

There are many other things that I cannot list exhaustively. I’ll add more if I think of them.