•The building environment is fairly new, and the air conditioning is quite cool

•It is fairly close to Qingguang Market, so getting food is convenient

I. Introduction

The company is divided into two parts—

•Overseas agent exhibitions (abbreviated as Overseas Exhibitions): Maoyou Exhibition Co., Ltd.

•Domestic self-organized exhibitions (abbreviated as Domestic Exhibitions): Maoyou Exhibitions Co., Ltd.

I worked at Maoyou (Domestic Exhibitions), so I will share from the perspective of working in Domestic Exhibitions.

II. Company Policies

•Salary structure

Salary = base salary + bonus + attendance bonus

1. Base salary: The amount on which the company actually enrolls you in labor and health insurance. Usually, it does not insure you for much (underreporting labor and health insurance wages).

2. Bonus: The remaining portion of the salary after deducting the amount insured for labor and health insurance.

3. Attendance bonus (NT$2,000): Please note that this is not a “perfect attendance bonus”! All leave other than annual leave will result in a deduction of the attendance bonus (including menstrual leave). In addition to a salary deduction for being late (approximately a few dollars per minute), the attendance bonus will also be deducted if you are late more than three times in a month, if three instances (inclusive) total more than 30 minutes, or if any single instance exceeds 15 minutes. (Being more than one minute late or being late more than once results in the full NT$2,000 deduction—no joke.)

•Leave regulations

1. Annual leave must be requested one day in advance, and must be taken for a full day at a time; half-days or hourly leave are not allowed.

2. There is a business meeting every week. If you take leave on that day, the boss will question you; some people who took leave that day were even called back to the company for the meeting.

•Overtime system

1. The company publicly states that working hours are 9:00–18:00, but when you report for work, HR will say that the company’s required end time is 18:30.

2. There is no overtime pay. The employee handbook contains provisions related to overtime pay (probably added because the company had previously been reported), but I have never seen where the overtime application form is, and no one has ever applied for it.

•Company activities

The company’s welfare committee is formed by grouping all employees (except one longtime accountant). Employees must plan activities such as company trips, Christmas events, and the spring banquet (there is no year-end banquet).

The above are some defects in the company’s policies. The company regulations are kept in the pantry, and employees are prohibited from photographing or leaking them. As for why they cannot be leaked, please imagine for yourselves.

III. Job Details

•Unclear and unfair division of authority

1. Work often falls on certain people—the concept of the more capable doing more. In this company, as long as you know how to placate the boss, the worse you perform, the more comfortably you get by. In any case, if the boss does not trust someone to do a task, she will assign it to someone else.

2. Employees who do not bear final responsibility often slack off as well (sometimes disappearing for an hour or falling asleep at work until their monitor goes black). In any case, the final report is not submitted by them, but by someone else. (It is like the person responsible for consolidating a group report having to deal with someone who pastes Wikipedia content into the presentation.) Reporting this situation to a supervisor is useless, by the way~

3. The boss often assigns a task to someone whenever she thinks of it, with no concept of division of labor whatsoever.

•Staff shortages

There are basically only two people handling back-office work (one is the vice president, who also has many other responsibilities). They are responsible for all promotion, exhibition operations, and communication with convention contractors for two exhibitions, among other things. Everyone else is in sales, because the company focuses only on booth sales (explained in more detail below). There is actually far too little staff, and the company often changes orders from one day to the next, so the speed of execution can never keep up with the speed of change. The boss often does not consider the difficulty of execution and thinks everything is just manual work—why would it be impossible?

•No planning or systems, and no foresight

The boss has no experience organizing exhibitions herself, so she runs domestic self-organized exhibitions using the overseas-exhibition model (note: overseas-exhibition staff are basically made up of salespeople and are responsible only for selling convention booths and subsequent customer service). We have no planning or organizational systems and focus only on booth sales. As a result, Domestic Exhibitions become more difficult every year, because all we know how to do is sell booths and we do not actually provide customers with the benefits they want.

•The boss loves haggling but does not pay

There are many contractors for the conventions. Once a stage of work is completed, contractors need to submit payment requests. The boss often holds back many payments and does not pay them. She does not care even when the employees serving as points of contact are aggressively chased for payment. She has even told employees to tell contractors that the delays are because the accountant resigned. (But it was the boss who fired the accountant.)

IV. Personnel Environment

•The boss’s personality

1. She imagines that she has many close friends, but her friends approach her only for their own interests, so employees often have to do work for her “sisters” and “close friends.”

2. To achieve her own goals, she demands that everyone do things her way. It is one-person rule: everything is decided by her, even when doing things that way wastes time.

3. She can suddenly lose her temper. You never know when you will be unlucky enough to be scolded or chased over something inexplicable. In short, staying there creates considerable mental pressure.

4. If someone resigns, that person becomes her enemy. (The period from submitting your resignation to actually leaving will be very painful; she may look for opportunities to humiliate you.)

5. Decisions are meaningless. A decision made at a meeting one week may immediately change the following week. She often forgets what she herself has said, as well as decisions she has made, so employees continually waste time revising the same things.

6. To get contracts signed, she often makes casual promises to clients, damaging market rates. More than 60% of clients also have customized requirements, making execution difficult for employees, but she does not care. To her, it is just manual work.

7. She has unrealistic expectations but lacks ability, and does not respect expertise—trying to get a full-course meal made for the price of chocolate toast (the same applies to both employees and contractors).

8. She distrusts employees to an extreme degree. Nothing they do is ever satisfactory to her; she only sees what employees have not done, not how much they have done.

9. She likes to copy others. Everything from other companies seems best, yet she will say that competitors do a worse job than she does.

•Company parasites

1. An arrogant, long-serving senior consultant who contributes nothing. He takes no responsibility whatsoever and only says, “I don’t know what this is about, but you need to #@$!@_# do it.” Simply put, he only talks, never understands the situation, and randomly dumps work on others, causing everyone trouble and distress.

2. A contract engineer who is rarely seen. He essentially has no practical use, appearing only to transfer Outlook mailboxes when personnel are replaced and to flatter the boss.

3. The longtime accountant is the boss’s master of hoarding money and is stingy with employees. When I asked him how my year-end bonus of only a few thousand dollars had been calculated, he replied, “It was just calculated. The company didn’t make any money!”

4. The graphic designer often disappears or dozes off at work. Even when given tasks a month in advance, he does not work on them in the meantime, invariably waits until the last day, and then delays them. The work he produces is also ugly. However, he does not have this kind of slack-off attitude when dealing with the boss or other supervisors~

V. Conclusion

In short, if you are extremely thick-skinned and have the attitude of “I’m just a lousy person,” then you are very suited to this company.

Normal people will have an extremely painful time at this company, to the point that it may affect both their mental and physical health.