Workplace reviews and discussion: 寧斐御業有限公司

Suitable for fresh graduates to come in and be put through hell, teaching you the importance of choosing your job carefully.

1. The working environment is extremely poor. As soon as you walk into the office, it feels like entering a sauna, because more than a dozen computers are running and a bunch of people are emitting carbon dioxide. The office rarely turns on the air conditioning either (officially, they say the company is being environmentally friendly, but I have no idea who they are trying to impress). In a hot and stuffy environment, I happened to be doing engineering work that required brainpower, which was mentally exhausting. To put it in the words of a “strawberry generation” worker: I came to work in an office, so why the hell is there no air conditioning? I don’t know whether the leadership’s brains have already overheated or whether they are really that desperate to save on electricity. I don’t understand what kind of benefits this person expects employees to produce by keeping them in a completely uncomfortable environment. And yet, when he himself returned to the office, he could turn on the air conditioning.

2. Severe overtime with no overtime pay; they only string you along with a bonus system, and there is no such thing as taking leave.

You arrive at the company at 8:30 and usually work overtime until 9 or 10 p.m. (Being able to leave at 10 is already considered lucky, using the excuse that you need to take public transportation home.)

My personal experience was that, as soon as I joined, I was required to sleep at the company and work myself to exhaustion. Of course, there was no air conditioning while sleeping either. It was summer at the time, and for several days I spent several hours in a state of light sleep before getting up to continue working myself to exhaustion. After that, I never slept at the company again. They would also brainwash you into treating the company like your home, and if you did not cooperate with overtime, colleagues who had already been brainwashed would berate you, saying that you did not love the company.

3. The boss is very good at talking, often saying how capable he is at taking on government projects and how many employees he can support, but when it comes to actually doing things, it seems he really only contributes his mouth.

What I personally encountered was that the boss accepted projects without conducting a technical assessment, then dumped the mess (I cannot disclose too much because of a confidentiality agreement) on a newcomer who had just joined. The technical work—concerning software under Autodesk—was something that only a veteran with many years in the industry could do well. He even told me to figure things out on my own if I did not know how, along with other ridiculous remarks such as, “The other employees who joined did not know everything either...” As for why the mess was dumped on me, it was because the company had no other professionals in this area. Apparently, there had been relevant staff before, but they had all left.

The boss also frequently called meetings for no reason, often lasting one or two hours, wasting everyone’s working time. The meeting content sounded like grand principles, but in practice it was all the same tired nonsense: either complaining that the progress was too slow and that it was all the employees’ fault, completely unrelated to him, or brainwashing you by saying that the company had a very promising future and that you had to work hard and keep up with your boss’s pace.

I did not encounter sexual harassment, though, since I am a man and, to put it kindly, not good-looking.

After joining the company, I discovered that they were recruiting people for interviews every day. Frequently, someone would schedule an interview in the morning and then call in the afternoon to cancel (eight times out of ten, they had probably Googled the online reviews). Also, within less than a week of my joining, three people had already resigned.

In short, I did not last a month before resigning. After all, there was no reason for me to stay long at a place without any senior technicians; it would only limit my own growth and waste my life.

That month, I worked slightly more than 22 days, for a total of nearly 270 hours (just an estimate—sometimes I developed a severe migraine after working overtime for too long, forgot to clock out, and went home). In the end, my actual pay was... terrible. I am not sure whether the confidentiality agreement says I cannot disclose the exact amount, so I will not give the actual figure. It was roughly several thousand dollars less than the starting salary I knew graduates were receiving. This was because the final salary calculation was “negotiated salary × actual days worked / 30.” When I first entered the workforce, I knew perfectly well that I was still inexperienced, so I only dared to ask for a starting salary typical of southern Taiwan. I also had the foolish fantasy that perhaps the boss would develop a conscience after seeing how hard I worked. In short, I was just trying to get a job first so my family would not worry.

This job is suitable for ignorant fresh graduates just entering the workforce, workaholics, or people who have lost hope in their current lives and are also despairing about the future. If your life is empty, you have no friends, personal interests, or aspirations, you are welcome to go for an interview.