The work is not difficult

There is a cleaning lady on a fixed schedule

The salary is average

There are snacks

Drinks are provided every week

The office is as quiet as a library

1. Overtime is the norm (working 2–4 extra hours every day is common). Unless you are assigned to an easygoing team, you can only leave work on time if you are in a relatively light group—but if HR or other colleagues think you are too idle, they may transfer you to a busy group.

2. The work is dull and monotonous. The actual duties are completely different from what is written on the job website, and what is explained during the interview is also very vague. They say it is confidential, and after joining the company, you are not allowed to disclose the nature of the work to outsiders.

3. Many colleagues do not have very good emotional management skills. They bang on their keyboards loudly (loud enough for the entire office floor to hear), slam their mice, sigh loudly and repeatedly, and stomp when they walk. Several colleagues never smile at all (perhaps the pressure is genuinely very high), and many secretly report on others, such as how many times you use your phone. However, some people are good-tempered and may privately help new employees adapt, but these people usually can only silently endure the office’s mysterious (?) atmosphere.

4. Employee turnover is very high. After working there for a few months, I saw approximately 10 people leave. However, on websites such as Interview Fun and Tianyancha, you will usually see comments from company accounts claiming that the turnover rate is below the industry average.

5. HR does not trust employees at all, and the rules are rigid. It often feels as though HR is constantly monitoring your work, and they also like to respond to questions with counterquestions. Regarding the rigid rules: once you finish your work, you are not allowed to do anything else; otherwise, HR will call you over to check whether you are too idle. (Although they always claim to be a foreign company, the rules are very traditional. Rather than evaluating employees based on efficiency, they treat everyone like potential thieves, forcing employees to pretend to be busy even after finishing their work. They are also extremely strict and inflexible about working hours and lunch breaks.)

6. Some employees do not even have basic word-processing software such as Word installed on their computers. If they ask HR for it, they may be questioned about why they need the software, so they can only use online tools such as Google Docs instead. (Other employees clearly do have these basic programs.) As for why software requests have to go through HR, apart from the team leaders of the various business-processing groups (who have little management authority), HR is the only department that plays a managerial role in the company, and there is no one else to ask.

7. Continuing from the previous point, the company’s organizational structure is extremely unclear. You will not know what departments actually exist in the company or whom to contact when something happens. Employees are treated somewhat like robots: they only need to know what repetitive tasks to perform in their particular positions. You may not even get answers to questions such as who the company’s owner is or why there are several seemingly related systems with different names. As for the company’s employees, you only know their names; otherwise, you know nothing about them.

8. After becoming familiar with some people at the company, you discover that everyone actually feels the company atmosphere is strange and the systems are unclear, and that they all feel inexplicably stressed. However, it seems that no one in the entire office speaks up, or that the general attitude is unwelcoming toward chatting, which prevents people from communicating. Everyone assumes that the others can accept it, so they silently endure it.