Workplace reviews and discussion: 開羅直效行銷贈品事業股份有限公司

1. The company is located right by a metro station, so commuting is convenient.

2. Once a month, there is a company dinner during after-work hours.

(Attendance is semi-compulsory; it runs very late, and there is a strong drinking culture.)

Company policies:

1. It is a small, people-oriented company (a little over 10 employees) that seriously lacks the standardized work practices and common sense typically found in ordinary companies.

2. Its understanding of professional expertise is seriously lacking. Although it hires professionals, they are required to follow the boss’s way of doing things, making it difficult to achieve normal results.

3. Its understanding of performance is very traditional. It considers someone who looks very serious at their desk to be working, while a designer wearing headphones is considered inattentive. At the same time, it uses working hours from other industries to demand that designers in different industries produce the same results.

4. The boss is also the supervisor and seriously distrusts subordinates. They repeatedly reconfirm assigned tasks, and because they lack understanding of various areas of expertise, they adopt a principle of distrust and instead use their own methods (if you object, they will make things difficult for you).

They have a self-assured personality, and a great deal of time in the workflow is spent satisfying the boss’s personal judgment, sometimes even contradicting the client’s original request. Conflicting instructions from clients, the sales team, and the boss result in projects taking twice the effort and time for half the results.

5. They are unwilling to train employees (even when the training is free), yet demand immediate contributions.

6. There are surveillance cameras in the office, and they use them to monitor employees and assess work performance.

Salary and benefits:

1. Many job titles do not match the actual duties, but the advertised salary is generally NT$35,000.

2. For many highly specialized positions, they offer a guaranteed annual salary, but in practice you must work a full year to receive the money. At the same time, they make you handle a workload exceeding that amount. You have to endure it until you receive the money; if someone who has already received it leaves before completing a year, they must pay it back. There is also no year-end bonus.

3. Some positions use a bonus-based system, which is actually just a way to keep the base salary very low and use commission-based bonuses as an incentive. In practice, however, the vast majority of the bonuses are concentrated among one or two salespeople, so most employees may not receive any bonus.

4. It is a fixed-responsibility system with no overtime pay. The boss will also do everything possible to maximize their own interests (employees have been required to work overtime during annual leave and on typhoon days). There have been cases of staying up all night when projects approached their deadlines, but regardless of whether you work 24 hours of overtime, you will receive at most one day—eight hours—of compensatory leave.

5. You will be given a hard time regardless of whether you take personal leave or sick leave, and even bereavement leave.

Misrepresentations during the interview:

1. During interviews, they describe the company’s experience and vision as extremely perfect, but in reality, too much of what they say is inconsistent with the facts—they are just making grand promises.

2. The company has an extremely high turnover rate, with many people being fired or resigning voluntarily (and the way employees are treated is also like disposable chopsticks ==).

3. They discard employees once they have used them. As soon as a project ends, they start pressuring the designer to leave; once they win a client, they fire the salesperson.

You could simply say that everyone was deceived into joining. If I could give a rating of “Very Bad,” I definitely would.