Workplace reviews and discussion: 窩窩科技行銷股份有限公司

1. NT$1,000 Mid-Autumn Festival gift after completing one month of employment

2. Snacks and tea bags provided

3. The company provides Apple computers

1. The company’s marketing department has a turnover rate where the entire team is replaced approximately every two or three months.

2. At the company, having connections means you can get away with anything. Most people work themselves to death, while those who know the supervisors sleep until they naturally wake up before coming to work.

3. The company uses shrink wrap to package its products for shipment. When heated, the material gives off a terrible odor. One supervisor also said that the smell was bad, and told the employees packing the orders to go outside and take a walk if they felt uncomfortable, and to drink more milk when they got home.

(The company makes children’s health foods and tells customers that its products contain no artificial coloring, flavoring, or preservatives, yet this is how it speaks to its own employees.)

4. Every day they say they want to create a family-like atmosphere at the company. During review meetings, they tell employees, “It’s not as if we can’t afford to hire better people. Don’t look at the company through your short-sighted eyes.”

5. One supervisor said that overtime is due to one’s own poor efficiency and slow work pace, so applying for overtime pay will affect your performance evaluation.

6. When an employee resigns, one supervisor says, in a certain tone, that most companies will call the employee’s former company to ask about their previous performance.

They also say that collective resignations are very serious, but that the company simply does not want to make an issue of it with them; they never review the problems with the company’s systems or the supervisors’ treatment of people.

7. Not a single employee who works overtime dares to apply for overtime pay. Only a few hours before someone leaves, employees are told that if they think they worked overtime, they should apply for it (of course, no one does).

8. During meetings, they tell everyone not to take work home, but supervisors will dump work on you before the end of the workday and tell you to submit it the next day.

9. Strange things are always decided at the last minute. The workday ends at 7:00 p.m., but at 5:00 p.m. employees are told that they have to take inventory at 6:00 that day, which lasts until around 8:30. Don’t even mention overtime pay—there are no drinks or boxed meals either (and no one dares to submit an overtime claim).

10. Following up on point 9, when the supervisor needs to stay late to reconcile the accounts, they arrange a group order of good food for dinner and eat their fill before getting to work. (They really do treat the employees like family.)

11. Someone connected to the supervisor under the design department responds “What the fuck?” when other people ask them questions.

12. For the Mid-Autumn Festival, the company used an employee’s former employment connection at Starbucks to purchase more than 20 boxes of Starbucks mooncakes and made the employee mail them out. The employee did not receive even one box.

13. Supervisors tell engineers that schedules are negotiable, but they have never actually discussed them with the engineers. Once a project is assigned, they simply announce the deadline, and the schedule is always one that can only be met by working overtime on weekends to rush the work.

14. An engineer took work home and worked overtime until midnight, but the supervisor never asked whether they wanted to apply for overtime. During a meeting, the CEO said in front of everyone, “Are the engineers on their honeymoon?” (Because the engineer left work on time.)

15. The company works with an internet service provider. The company treats them with extreme deference; even when the bugs are caused by the provider, they are handed off to the company’s internal front-end team to fix, and the company considers this to be only natural.

16. Employees who are close to senior management will come and pretend to be very friendly with you, get you to open up completely, and then distort what you said and pass it on within the company. During meetings, they then criticize people for saying things recklessly in private.

17. At lunchtime on the day an employee resigned, the company’s CEO loudly called out in the office, inviting everyone to go out for lunch. The departing employee was not invited and could only sit at their desk and stare blankly.

18. They believe that employees resigning collectively is because the employees formed cliques and incited emotions. On the day of the resignations, they even held a meeting to “warn employees:

If you dare spread rumors online, we will sue you. We are willing to spend a lot on lawyers anyway, so this is no big deal~

Following up on point 18, I hereby declare that if any of the above is untrue, I swear that I will be struck by lightning and die a horrible death.”