Workplace reviews and discussion: 異象醫藥公關有限公司

During the interview and when she doesn’t know you well yet, she will treat you very well, showing a very warm smile and telling you about her values, vision, and ideals, making you feel that working at this company is meaningful and offers opportunities for growth.

1. The company is very small, with around 10–15 people (there are 4–6 interns during the summer; they always take interns because there is simply too much work to finish).

2. A large part of the reason the work never gets finished is that the company’s administrative efficiency is extremely poor. Everything—even something as minor as sending a LINE message to a client—has to be approved by the boss before it can be sent. As you can imagine, every day there is a long line of people waiting for the boss to review all sorts of things. However, the boss sometimes comes in late (because of her daughter, her dog, meetings outside, etc.), perhaps not arriving at the office or checking LINE until the afternoon. You end up pretending to be busy all day because a project cannot move forward until the boss has reviewed it. But if you do not do anything, your supervisor will report your work situation to the boss.

3. Oh, right, there are supervisors too! The supervisors here have zero authority to delegate or make decisions. The boss has the final say on everything, so supervisors either make minor changes or ask you to make major revisions. In any case, after the boss sees it, it will be revised many more times, and you will take the blame for the mistakes. The upside is that the boss is extremely suspicious and will also suspect that your supervisor failed to give you proper instructions—which happens to be true.

4. Going back to the boss’s freestyle approach to working hours: if the boss arrives late, say at 1:00 p.m., meetings still start from the scheduled time of 8:00 a.m. So if your meeting was originally scheduled for 4:00 p.m., congratulations—you will not be able to have the meeting until after 9:00 p.m.

5. Overtime is the norm. Even if you leave at 7:00 or 8:00 p.m., you will keep being asked whether you have other things to do (damn, I’m leaving work). When I worked at this company, the usual leaving time was after 8:30 p.m., and the latest I ever left was after midnight. You ask what I was doing? Waiting for the boss to reply on LINE!!!! (Damn.)

6. Overtime must be applied for in advance, and the process is made unnecessarily difficult. Overtime that was not applied for cannot be recorded on the time clock; the HR lady will clock you out on your behalf (which violates the Labor Standards Act).

7. The breakdown on your payslip may change because of the company’s poor financial situation (?), with the base salary reduced and bonuses increased. Although the total amount remains unchanged, arbitrarily changing the salary structure to evade taxes or reduce labor and health insurance payments is truly despicable.

8. Employee turnover is extremely high; the people who leave are all smart. However, the boss continually disparages former employees in front of current staff.

9. The boss is extremely emotional. When she likes you, she will treat you unbelievably well; on the one hand it is gratifying, but on the other it feels very fake. When she dislikes you, she will openly berate you in front of the entire office and badmouth you everywhere, making you feel isolated and as though your self-respect has been trampled on. It is unbelievable that an adult who has lived this long would behave this way.

10. The boss is the chairperson of the alumni association for a department at Taipei Medical University. However, I have personally seen how she “takes care of” several junior schoolmates from the same university. I sincerely advise you: whether or not you are an alumnus of this school, do not try it lightly, and do not assume that you will be treated better because you are a junior schoolmate. The boss may change her circumstances, but her nature remains the same. Especially if you graduated from a prestigious university, there are truly many broader paths available.