Workplace reviews and discussion: 星澤國際有限公司

The colleagues get along very well. Everyone complains about the boss together and says they want to quit. That's it.

During the interview, they painted an overly rosy picture, making it sound like there were tons of amazing learning opportunities—“we’re not afraid of you learning; we’re only afraid you won’t learn.”

Then, during the interview, we agreed that the probationary salary would start at 30,000. But when I actually started work, it was only 28,000. The worst part was that when they asked me to sign the employment contract, they used all kinds of excuses to evade and dodge, leaving me no opportunity to ask questions. The entire four- or five-page contract was packed with clauses protecting the company rather than safeguarding employees’ rights. I could still understand and accept that—perhaps the company owner feels insecure and is afraid of “confidential information” being leaked, and so on...

However, when I had questions about the contract, which was full of provisions unfavorable to employees, none of the supervisors were around. After half an hour, they came back and asked whether I had finished signing. Then they simply took it away, saying, “I’m busy right now and don’t have time. We’ll talk later.” There was never any follow-up. They completely prevented me from asking questions and semi-coerced me into signing—or leaving. (Later, when I asked former colleagues after resigning, I learned that their evasive tactics and automatic salary reductions had already been used for a long time. I wasn’t their first victim.)

The actual job duties were also completely different from what they described during the interview. The boss would make you constantly shoot TikTok-style videos—videos with very little substance or quality—and force you to watch TikTok videos every day to learn filming and camera-movement techniques, at least three videos a day. If your videos looked too polished, they would say they were no good, reject them, and send you back to reshoot and re-edit them. Later, after figuring out what style of video they wanted, I realized it was basically footage with ultra-fast cuts, so fast that you couldn’t understand what had even been filmed, paired with extremely noisy music. They absolutely loved that fast-paced style.

And the funniest part is that the two supervisors knew nothing about photography or videography techniques. They were constantly correcting you with bizarre techniques, presenting wrong ideas as right and acting as if they were experts. They had absolutely no respect for other people’s professionalism.

Honestly, after just two weeks there, I had already seen far too many bizarre things. Every morning, we had to attend a morning meeting and draw an inspirational-quote postcard, then share what we saw and how we felt about the card. Every day, we were tormented with a pile of pointless postcards—and they were all in simplified Chinese because the bosses had returned from mainland China. Every day during the lunch break, we had to dance for 15 minutes; not dancing was not allowed. It was extremely bizarre... Every day, the sales department had to face their own performance charts and yell a bunch of nonsense, making the company seem just like a direct-sales operation. Employees also had to hug each other, high-five, cheer, and encourage one another every day. But their salespeople weren’t actually seeking out excellent Taiwanese brands; they just called people everywhere to ask whether they needed news-style videos produced and distributed for publicity. Extremely strange...

The only way to survive at the company was to flatter the boss relentlessly every day. Then you would receive special treatment.

The day before I resigned, I felt unwell and took sick leave at home. After I submitted my resignation that evening, the boss started criticizing everything about me. Then they said my salary would be calculated by the day: since I hadn’t come in on weekends, those days wouldn’t count, and since I hadn’t come in while on sick leave, I wouldn’t be paid for those days either. After deducting everything possible, my final pay was pitifully low...

In short, the company’s work environment and culture were terrible. During the two weeks I was there, three people resigned and two others wanted to resign but couldn’t leave. My colleagues also complained that the workload was enormous, while the base salary was only 27K; they had to work tons of overtime just to earn bonuses and barely reach the 40K ceiling.

The bosses don’t like you calling them by their names, and they like it even less when you call them “boss.” You have to call them “Teacher”~~~~~ Every day it’s “Good morning, Teacher,” “Thank you, Teacher,” “Reporting to you, Teacher,” and you have to keep reporting your work progress to the Teacher in the work group chat and flatter the Teacher~

That’s all. The more I talk about it, the angrier I get. I’m done.