The company can definitely afford to pay your salary.

Someone previously shared about an e-commerce business position at this company on the forum, so I’ll continue with another account. This position was initially based in Shulin and was later moved to the Neihu headquarters. After I joined, the e-commerce business team had already been divided into two sections, but the work was not completely separated. Customer maintenance and business development still overlapped. When I asked senior colleagues questions, many of them did not know the answers. I am genuinely curious how they managed to get through the four years since the department was established.

To some extent, working here is like being in the military. You will see supervisors holding a bunch of meaningless meetings all day, the most senior employees taking three- or four-day weekends and arriving late every day, and your senior colleagues playing video games and watching YouTube at work—yet none of them suffer any consequences. Because you are new, you get assigned more tasks. Even if you seriously complete everything, you will only be assigned more work. If you chat with colleagues for a couple of minutes at work, you will be told that you are not taking your work seriously, while their watching stocks and chatting nonsense during work hours is considered completely normal. So if you are only looking at the salary, you might as well consider becoming a volunteer soldier—the pay is higher. But since no one likes serving in the military, freedom is unbeatable here. At the headquarters, you do not need to clock in, and that is still the arrangement for now.

Because people move through this place quickly, handovers are also very casual. There is no handover checklist or explanation of administrative procedures. New employees can only look through old materials on their own and correct things after making mistakes. Senior and experienced colleagues will not proactively come to find you, while those who do proactively approach you may suddenly be laid off, with the reason given as not fitting the corporate culture. The corporate culture here is very rigid; you can understand it after experiencing the efficiency of an administrative process once. There are also departments that specifically look for trouble with you. From official document approvals to entering data into the system, after you have completed the entire process and are about to carry it out, they may ask you to run through it again; if an official document goes missing, they will ask you to process it again; or if they failed to set up the system properly, they will ask you to re-enter the data. The purpose is simply to prevent you from having too much free time.

Speaking of having too much free time, there are some unnecessary staff and cliques at the headquarters. They spend all day checking your typos and punctuation in official documents, whether you secretly complain about the company, whether your sitting posture at work is proper, and whether you observe proper etiquette when a supervisor comes over to chat with you. They are like the Eastern Depot of the Ming dynasty, watching to see whether you genuinely identify with Hi-Life. Even if you perform well at business entertaining, you still have to take pride, from the bottom of your heart, in being a member of this organization. By the way, since this is a sales position, there are still quite a few business-entertainment events. The supervisors arrange them, and you cannot refuse. You have to drink alcohol every time.

The sales role is supposed to motivate you to work hard toward performance-based bonuses, but the bonus system here exists only for appearances and is not actually implemented according to its stated rules. When you ask questions related to bonuses, your supervisor may even respond that they do not know and that you should ask someone higher up. You have no idea how much money you will receive or what formula is used to calculate it. They only say it depends on performance, but how performance is calculated is not disclosed either; it is entirely subjective. They give you as much as they feel like giving. If you receive something, it is treated as a favor; if you receive nothing, it means you are useless.

But to sum it up, as long as you can breathe, e-commerce here can keep operating and performance will continue to grow, because whether you are here or not actually makes no difference. In its e-commerce business, this company relies solely on one vendor, and that vendor’s campaigns alone are enough to support the logistics operation. Other e-commerce companies, whether large or small, that have not signed contracts do not particularly like working with Hi-Life. Ultimately, the fundamental problem is the number of stores, but that is not something you need to worry about.

If you consider yourself someone who only wants a job that keeps you from starving, wants a stable and peaceful life, wants to experience something similar to acting out military service at work, and wants to experience the efficiency of administrative procedures at a large Taiwanese company, then this department and this job may suit you quite well. After all, Hi-Life is too big to fail—and too big to be allowed to fail.