Workplace reviews and discussion: 築文創藝術股份有限公司

Convenient company location

Friendly colleagues

When I first joined, I discovered that the senior colleague who had held the position I applied for had left the company at lightning speed.

Later, I learned from another more senior employee (who has also since left) that this was because the colleague had become pregnant.

She felt that the boss’s words and actions would have a very negative effect on prenatal education and therefore decided to resign immediately.

Seriously violates the Labor Standards Act.

Labor pension contributions are deducted directly from salaries. Employees who raise this issue get the money refunded, while those who do not raise it do not.

Weekend overtime is routine, with no overtime pay. There is also no compensation policy for working on consecutive holidays.

The only arrangement mentioned is compensatory leave, but because there are too few staff and too much work, you may not necessarily be able to take the compensatory leave either.

During interviews, the boss loves to paint grand visions and deceive young people.

In reality, this is a company that may not even have its next project.

The company mainly handles arts and cultural event projects. After April 2020, all originally scheduled projects were canceled.

The stable income the company relied on last year and the year before (the publication rights for two government-agency publications)

was also lost because of the boss’s mistakes (such as forgetting to bring the documents that the person in charge was required to fill out on the day of a government tender proposal, among other things).

As a result, the company currently has serious problems with its operations and sources of income (it would not be surprising if it shut down at any time).

Anyone considering working there should think carefully.

The boss has no business sense at all. The only thing he has relied on is the network he built up from graduating from an arts college.

But because of his problems as a person (taking advantage of friends, not taking projects seriously even after winning them, delaying payments and dragging out timelines, and personal laziness),

that network is now nearly exhausted as well.

He loves bragging to employees about how well connected he is with this person or that person, and how familiar he is with various conductors and directors.

Yet when someone needs to be contacted, it turns out he does not actually have their contact information.

Employees often have to call the switchboard at the person’s workplace and ask to be transferred, only for the person to say upon answering that they barely know Zhu Wen Chuang.

The employees were generally very united (at least during my time there) and were young people who genuinely loved art.

They wanted to do a better job on the company’s projects than the boss did.

Yet the boss was lazy, careless, and completely uninvolved (he would not even read employees’ work updates) and would not show up until the week before an event.

Then he would start nitpicking and questioning everything, even though all the items had already been reported as completed.

When he noticed that the employees had too good a relationship, he would try to drive them apart.

He would badmouth employees to business partners and tell each employee bad things about the others.

His scheming was at an elementary-school level.

I can only say that fortunately my coworkers were united enough while I was there.

We did not have to deal with this kind of pointless mind game with the boss on top of our already heavy workload.

The office is extremely small, messy, and has no partitions.

When you are trying to work seriously, you are often disturbed by the boss loudly chatting with friends on the phone.

At first, you go through a period when the boss pretends to be generous (buying things for everyone to eat and so on).

But after about one or two months, you discover how unbelievably stingy he is with money (including asking why you did not use your own EasyCard when submitting a business-expense claim for the MRT fare).

The boss smokes in the office. After one coworker could not tolerate the smell and raised the issue,

the boss only refrained from smoking when that coworker was in the office. If she was absent, he continued smoking as usual.

The boss claimed that a cleaning lady would be hired for the office, but in reality, she might not come even once in two months.

So working here also means taking responsibility for routine cleaning, taking out the trash, and other such tasks yourself.

The boss’s biggest sales pitch is claiming that he treats employees like family and friends.

When he notices that everyone is dissatisfied, he sheds tears and says that he hopes everyone will help finish the project.

But in reality, he casually wastes the project budget on items costing tens of thousands of dollars at department stores,

while the year-end bonus given to employees is not even half a month’s salary.