Workplace reviews and discussion: 美麥行銷股份有限公司

- The colleagues at the entry level are all very nice

- The office is on the 69th floor of Taipei 101, with a great view; it sounds impressive when you say it out loud (?)

- The pantry is well stocked

- Unlimited overtime

Overtime is commonplace in advertising or marketing companies, but as other former employees mentioned above, the level of overtime here means that every day you are not thinking about whether you will work overtime, but what time you will work until. I personally started working overtime during my first week at the company, and by the second week I was working until 10 p.m. (There are other colleagues who started on the same day as me and have worked overtime every day since their second day.) If you do not mind working overtime, I heard from other colleagues that the sunrise viewed from the 69th floor of 101 is quite beautiful.

- Absolutely no handover or adjustment period

Take the project planner position here as an example. On the second day after joining the company, the boss spent an hour explaining the current status of a client's project. After that, she told me that starting that day I had to take full control of the situation. From the second or third day onward, I was directly responsible for dealing with the client and other relevant parties (miscellaneous communications, reports, contacting endorsers' agents, and contacting media vendors). If I did not immediately follow up on the situation or accurately proceed with the next step, the boss would chew me out. Even though I had only taken over the project midway through, and had not even finished reading the new employee materials (yes, by the day I resigned, I had read less than 40% of those so-called new employee training materials), I was thrown straight into the deep end. There was absolutely no time to adapt or understand the company's methods and related procedures. During the course of a project, if there was any information that had not previously been communicated, I would only be told afterward how that part was supposed to be handled. Strictly speaking, it was almost as if there were no handover at all.

- Extremely high turnover and organizational problems

The entire company has fewer than 20 employees, and excluding the boss, even the most senior current employee has only been there for one year (the company has been around for about five years), which clearly shows how high the turnover is. In terms of the organization, the boss is nominally the chief operating officer and manages all projects, while project planners below her handle the actual work. Since the boss simply does not have time to review every situation, frontline employees are basically left to handle matters themselves. On the surface, you are given free rein, but as soon as a problem occurs, it becomes your responsibility. Even in serious situations, she will not step in to help deal with the client (I saw this happen to other colleagues). Also, because the boss is the highest authority, if she is dissatisfied with something proposed by a media vendor, she will leave you to communicate between the client and vendor without clearly explaining what exactly she dislikes, forcing you to guess and waste your time. In the end, it should not need further explanation who the unfortunate person becomes the target of both the media side and the client side.

- Loose and pitiful new employee training

What is called new employee training here consists of placing around three or four folders in a shared drive, containing past cases and a PPT giving a general introduction to the project process, and having new employees read them on their own. What is baffling is that, because you can only find time to read them yourself, under the no-adjustment-period and no-handover conditions mentioned above, it is practically impossible for anyone to finish reading the new employee training materials before starting practical work. Overall, this training is completely meaningless. (By the way, the company advocates “smart questions”: even if something was never explained, is not mentioned in the new employee materials, and was not covered in the “handover,” you are expected to search through past materials and Google the answer yourself. If you ask directly, you will even be given a dirty look :))

- When you resign, the boss will still emotionally blackmail you, telling you that she is very disappointed that you resigned, that you were not like this during the interview, that you should not put your self-respect ahead of everything else, and that you are just like those young people out there, among other things. After you announce your resignation, she will treat you as if you were invisible. But for someone who has been bombarded with the boss's messages every day up to that point, I believe this will actually feel like a kind of liberation.