If you earn the boss’s appreciation, the salary is within a reasonable range for the design industry. The relationships among colleagues are very good because everyone has a strong consensus about the problems with this company.

When you first join the company, the boss acts as though he has very high expectations of you and greatly admires you, appealing to your emotions by telling you that he wants to train you to become his successor and so on (several people received messages like this). But in reality, it truly is a rotten design company. The internal system is disgusting, with a scoring mechanism that is like an elementary-school child receiving “good job” stickers: points are deducted for being late, one point is added for presenting a proposal, one point is deducted each time the boss revises your work, and many points are added when the boss selects your work. It does not matter if the client dislikes it; it is entirely about currying favor with the boss and fulfilling his personal dreams. The boss has no professional design training, and judges whether a design is good or bad entirely according to his own outdated, old-fashioned “aesthetic.” All projects remain at the conceptual stage, with no concepts ever actually being implemented, so even when people working under him see problems, they cannot communicate with him about them. I was there for ten months and did not see a single project reach completion. Often, after the design was finished and the boss revised it into a version he considered good, it was simply impossible to execute, resulting in no follow-up. The boss also would not compromise with clients because they really are very wealthy; he takes the attitude that “if you don’t understand and won’t listen, you’re the ones who lose.” Finally, the male boss frequently sexually harasses female employees verbally, using uncomfortable language and repeatedly acting as though he wants to “be friends” with you, but it feels as though he is simply enjoying this kind of verbal flirtation.