Workplace reviews and discussion: 世潮企業股份有限公司

You can leave work on time because there is no overtime pay anyway.

1. An extremely conservative family business, where the boss’s management philosophy is to do everything personally. But one person is fundamentally incapable of managing dozens of brands, so the efficiency is predictably terrible.

2. The Dragon Boat Festival bonus is NT$500—so little it’s laughable.

3. Typhoon days off are unpaid, which effectively means your pay is deducted; it also puts the NT$1,000 perfect-attendance bonus at risk.

4. Mid-level managers are extremely good at making empty promises. During interviews, they lure people in by claiming there are performance bonuses, but later you find out they are team bonuses, and if even one team fails to meet its target, it is impossible to receive them.

5. A weekly meeting can go off on endless tangents and is extremely inefficient. Every week, you have to waste an entire afternoon listening to the boss talk about his past glories, as well as whatever superficial thing he learned from an app that he considers a great discovery on the level of Columbus.

6. There are no management guidelines or strategies whatsoever. The “do it the hard way” approach is the truth of a typical Taiwanese family business.

7. The company is heavily governed by personal relationships. If the boss takes a dislike to you, you are immediately blacklisted, for highly subjective reasons. For example, he might see that you are too friendly with a colleague he dislikes.

8. The boss likes to take afternoon naps but also wants to control everything. The result is that anything requiring his decision has to be put on hold.

9. Employees are deeply distrusted, because no matter how well you perform, you can never be closer to him than family members by blood.

10. Employees fall into two categories: ambitious types who love currying favor with the boss, and retirement-minded types with a civil-servant mentality. The ambitious types will stop at nothing to take credit.