Workplace reviews and discussion: 德隆常國際有限公司

Many accommodation and food experiences.

I resigned a few months ago.

I'm worried that someone else might get hurt, so I'm sharing my work experience now.

(This article is very long

because I'm afraid that if I don't explain more, someone might still foolishly join.)

Before I left the company, many newcomers came for interviews.

Most of them said they were really looking forward to working for a travel magazine.

There are indeed many special benefits and unique experiences.

Working here gives you plenty of accommodation and food experiences.

But everyone who worked together still gave up those benefits because of the boss, who was spoiled beyond belief.

1. The boss expects employees to do everything

At first, employees were hired for a single skill.

Later, after the company started producing videos,

he demanded that every employee be able to do

interviews and editing, layout and graphic design, video editing, and business trips,

but he was only willing to pay a monthly salary of 25,000 plus 1% of sales commissions.

(After labor and health insurance deductions, even with the commission it was less than 30,000.)

Business trips only came with transportation reimbursement.

For all other accommodation and meals, we had to contact the clients ourselves

and ask them to host us.

If a client did not want to host us, he told us to figure it out ourselves.

2. All kinds of elaborate ways to deceive clients

The boss was in sales, so he brought in most of the clients.

Then he would lie to clients and say

that we had a huge professional team producing the magazine.

(But in reality, only five people were producing a 132-page monthly magazine.)

He told clients that all the items received through exchanges would be given back to readers, but he sold them all himself.

He told clients that the magazine had passed the Ministry of Education's Outstanding Magazine selection,

but in fact, it had not even been evaluated yet (and later, it was not selected).

He told clients that we would give them exposure on all the major websites

and do online marketing for them, but we did nothing of the sort.

Most clients forgot about this service anyway.

One day, a client whose project had already been completed said

that they needed proof of exposure on the portal website before they could release the budget.

The boss secretly cursed the client as crazy

and even said, “It’s only written in the contract—do they really have to try to make us honor it?” (??????????)

3. Late salary payments; bonuses paid whenever he feels like it

When I first joined the company, salaries were paid on the last working day of every month.

After about six months, he began delaying payday,

claiming that there was no money to pay salaries.

He even told everyone that because he had sold his stock,

we had to wait two more days before he could pay us.

During the last two months before I resigned, salaries were paid sometime between the 1st and 5th of the month.

(The timing was extremely inconsistent.)

Outsourced workers had it even worse: when they got paid depended entirely on his mood.

Yet he required us to finish drafts by fixed deadlines,

without caring that there were not enough people to do the work.

Bonuses were supposed to be paid on the 15th of the following month,

but later he often delayed them until sometime in the 20s.

And every time he promised to give someone a certain percentage,

he would deny it a few days later.

He once boasted that he would only give more, never less,

but every time he stubbornly refused to pay and haggled over every penny.

It was unbelievably hypocritical.

4. Ignoring employees’ rights

Business trips used to be taken by train or bus.

But later, when there were so many clients that we had to travel south to Kaohsiung and Kenting,

the boss required us to drive in order to save on transportation costs.

His car was not insured—and, more importantly, he lied to us that it was.

A coworker whose father worked in auto insurance checked and discovered that there was no insurance, then called the boss.

Only then did the boss change his story and say,

“If you think driving is unsafe, you can take the train.”

There was also one coworker who had been working for several months,

but the boss had never enrolled him in National Health Insurance.

The coworker’s family found it strange and asked whether the company had insured him.

When they asked the boss whether he had enrolled him, he said yes.

But after they called the bookkeeper, they discovered that he had not.

The boss then told the bookkeeper to enroll him.

Two months later, another coworker discovered

that he had not been enrolled in labor insurance for part of his time after joining.

He only found out because the labor insurance documents were mailed to his home.

It turned out that the boss had not enrolled him immediately when he started.

Not enrolling employees would already be bad enough,

but he still deducted labor and health insurance contributions from our pay every month.

Really fantastic.

He once said, “I only care how much I earn.

I don’t give a damn how much you earn...

Of course I hope you earn as much as possible.”

He was truly a master of the sudden U-turn and the art of talking.

5. Complete disrespect for professional expertise

When several of us wanted to do a good job producing the magazine and filming good videos,

the boss would say,

“Do it faster! Shoot faster! Learn faster!”

Or when a client needed additional photos, he would say,

“Just take a few random shots with your phone.”

He would also tell us to say to the photographer,

“Just pressure the photographer a little—after shooting the client, have them shoot the location too.”

When it came to everyone’s new proposals, he would always say

there was no need for creative ideas;

we should just copy something from before and quickly make it for the client to see.

The most frustrating part was when the graphic designer had already told him

that one client logo as a watermark on the cover would be enough.

He insisted on putting three or four logos there, making the entire magazine cover covered in watermarks,

and said it was a gimmick (????).

After I resigned, he also said the magazine should stop using plastic wrapping

and instead seal the book’s opening with a sticker.

He even drew an extremely ugly design and told the graphic designer to make it that way.

Even when the graphic designer suggested that it would not look very good,

the boss still insisted on having the sticker made.

The result was so ugly that the graphic designer completely gave up on life and went home to drink heavily.

In short, he thought that as long as things were done quickly,

it was fine to do them carelessly.

But I believe none of my coworkers wanted to hand in careless, half-hearted work,

because this magazine represented the professionalism of the few of us who made it.

That is why everyone got angry whenever he said things like “do it faster” or “just take a few random shots.”

The most outrageous incident was when a graphic designer with five years of experience came for an interview.

Everyone was amazed by his portfolio, and everyone who saw it praised it.

But the 25,000 salary here shocked him.

He said even new graduates should be getting 29,000.

When we asked how much he would need to come to work, he said 35,000.

After the interviews had lasted all day, the boss asked us which candidate was good.

We said the one asking for 35,000 was truly excellent.

His portfolio was practically a perfect magazine.

But the boss said, “I think what he makes is just so-so.”

(The boss’s aesthetic sense is so poor that he would need to kneel before an elementary-school art teacher for the rest of his life.)

Everyone knew he was only saying that because he thought the candidate was too expensive, so he deliberately said the opposite.

6. The boss’s rules were constantly changing, and he made things up whenever he disliked someone

Previously, he had reached an agreement with a coworker

that the coworker could arrive at the office at 10 a.m.

But he loved saying that this coworker did not follow the rules, was always late, and took too much leave.

Yet no matter how “late” that coworker was, they always arrived at 10.

Their leave consisted of compensatory days off from holiday business trips and annual leave;

they had not violated any rules.

This was simply because the boss disliked them.

There was also a male coworker whom the boss came to hate because of certain things.

But that coworker was truly 100% innocent.

The boss disliked him because he misunderstood him and then invented stories in his head.

After that, whenever there was a problem, he assumed it had been caused by that male coworker.

Even after the coworker resigned, he continued blaming everything on him.

But in reality, that male coworker had done absolutely nothing wrong.

7. Extreme disrespect toward female employees

He would look at female employees’ Facebook pages,

and once even shared one with his friends, which an employee discovered.

Whenever a female employee was attractive, he would show her excessive attention.

He once asked a female employee, “Are you 54 kilograms?”

and also said, “I think she has a great figure.”

The worst incident was when a client wanted to film a scene of bathing in a hot spring.

But he did not want to hire a model to appear in the shot,

so he told us magazine employees to do it.

Everyone said that we happened to be on our periods and could not participate.

But in the company-wide group chat

(which included his friends and freelance photographers), he wrote:

“I suddenly miss OO. (OO was a female employee who had already resigned.)

We’re going to the client’s place to film next Monday. Everyone at this company is on their period,

so no one can get in the hot spring. OO has never had this problem.”

Saying things like that in a group with such a complicated mix of people—

I really have no idea what he was trying to accomplish.

I’m already exhausted from typing this much,

but these things are only the tip of the iceberg at this company.

(There was also hiding sales revenue, borrowing money through loans everywhere, and so on.)

By the end, the boss had left me physically and mentally exhausted.

Even being able to stay in hotels all over the country and eat all kinds of delicacies on business trips

could not make up for how awful the boss was or how spoiled he was.

I sincerely recommend that everyone avoid working for this kind of terrifying company.

That’s all. I won’t say any more.