Workplace reviews and discussion: 創空間概念股份有限公司

They will teach you how to create polished design presentations and how to market yourself.

1. There will be endless meetings, but they often have little conclusion or meaning. You will probably spend two or three hours listening to senior executives make impassioned speeches or remind all the designers to work hard to meet their performance targets.

2. The company emphasizes SOP procedures, but many of them are meaningless and may even lead to rework. Moreover, during employee training, not all procedures are taught, and there is no SOP manual to consult. You have to ask about everything yourself, and you may not necessarily get an answer.

3. You need to fill out a large number of ISO documents, but these documents are merely for obtaining ISO certification. Whether the projects actually comply with ISO procedures is another matter.

Designers spend almost all their time on these three things: paperwork, going through procedures and approvals, helping vendors submit payment requests, and coordinating with various departments. Then, in the evening, they work overtime under the duty-based system to draw construction plans and 3D renderings—the work designers are actually supposed to do.

4. Rather than designers, we are more like salespeople. Regardless of whether the current workload can be handled or whether the project type is actually feasible to execute, senior management always says to sign the contract first and worry about the rest later.

To meet contract-signing targets, senior management often offers unreasonable discounts or prices. But in order to achieve the company's required high profits and gross margins, designers are often asked to negotiate with vendors and demand low prices with high quality. If the required gross margin is not achieved, designers will not receive bonuses or may even be formally reprimanded. The designers are not the ones giving the discounts, but they are expected to bear the responsibility when profits fall short.

It is truly difficult to demand both an excellent horse and that it not eat grass.

As for project pricing and quality, you constantly feel as though you are compromising your conscience while serving clients.

5. Internal struggles within the company are also very serious. On the surface, everyone uses bureaucratic language and acts amicably, but in reality, everyone is looking out for themselves.

After the design department signs a contract, it throws the problems to the engineering department, which then has to find a way to deal with them.

Reserve managers, in order to climb the corporate ladder, always dump work and problems on the designers below them, then take all the credit for themselves. Designers who are difficult to control or have too many ideas will be smeared and pressured into resigning.

6. Bonuses are also difficult to claim. You must complete the project-closing report within the deadline and pass an audit before you can receive the bonus.

Sometimes, to make the figures for each project look good, expenses from other projects are assigned to projects with good profits. This causes profitable projects to become ineligible for bonuses, but allows every project to be kept within the company's gross-margin targets. This way, senior management will not be criticized by the company, but designers and engineers will not receive their bonuses.

7. There is also the vendor payment system. Individually, the amounts are not very large, but simply going through the procedures takes a month, followed by issuing two-month promissory notes. Sometimes the accounting department fails to notice a vendor's invoice, delaying payment for several months. There have even been cases where vendors had completed the work but still had not received their deposits. I sincerely recommend not introducing your own vendors to this company; it will only harm them.

If you dislike internal conflict or are not very calculating or politically savvy, I recommend that you do not get involved in this mess.