Workplace reviews and discussion: 歐燦科技有限公司

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1. Located in Sanchong, this is a residence that appears to have been converted into a workspace, but it is piled high with product cartons. The interview space is a kitchen in the attic, and every other room you can think of is filled with products.

2. There are only three people in the company: the owner, the owner's wife (accounting and general affairs), and the owner's son. They did not mention their relationships during the interview. I only found out after joining and asking about it. The person who interviewed me was the owner himself, and downstairs is their home.

3. The interview lasted more than two hours, but hardly anything was actually discussed. I had to keep listening to the owner talk about his glorious achievements in running a retail business, from the company's early days to the present, and about things he supposedly invented. You had no time to speak or express your own opinions. Well, he did ask you to introduce yourself, but once the self-introduction was over, he went right back to talking about the company's products.

4. The job was more graphic-design-oriented than a graphic designer's job—it was just that there were so many products to work on that it was enough to drive you crazy. I will mention this below.

5. This was a company that approached me for an interview; I did not apply myself. The reason they invited me was that they liked my work, but this later became the reason they gave for terminating me.

6. I joined before Double 11 and was terminated after Double 12. Those who understand will understand.

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I joined in mid-October and left in mid-December. The reason they asked me to interview was that they had seen my portfolio,

and thought my style suited their products. However, the reason for terminating me was that my style was unsuitable and that they considered me too slow (I produced more than a dozen images a day, and they still said I was slow).

After entering, look to the right and you will see a computer desk placed awkwardly in the middle of a room. That is the workspace.

After joining, I began working on the Double 11 designs.

During this period, they kept asking me to revise my work. The frequency of the revisions was enough to make you wonder whether the owner had been a plastic surgeon in a previous life.

He would even dictate where the text should go and what angle it should be placed at.

That is when you suddenly realize that this position is not marketing design at all, but simply graphic production work.

Yet during the interview and on the phone, he said he really liked my work????

They could request several rounds of revisions for one simple BANNER. If you were a beginner who did not understand, that would be one thing,

but for someone with relevant work experience whose portfolio they had already seen, such a high number of revisions was unusual.

They also required all the files from before and after each revision to be placed in the folder. I do not know why they kept files for projects that had not been approved; perhaps they wanted to use the assets later, I suppose.

Starting on my third day, they repeatedly mentioned how well the first graphic designer had done and told me to copy them directly. I adjusted some of the things made by that first designer, which were already outdated and unusable. And this so-called first graphic designer had left more than ten years ago; I do not know how many people had replaced them in the meantime.

But they still kept telling you how wonderful, great, and capable the first graphic designer was.

I can understand his thinking, though: a thousand pieces of gold cannot buy back knowing earlier; first loves are always intoxicating, and what we have lost is always deeply missed. I also really miss the scallion pancakes sold outside my home when I was a child.

They kept praising a graphic designer from more than a decade ago while DISSING your work.

Anyone who has heard about this situation should know what was going on.

They said their products had a Japanese-style aesthetic and required Japanese-style work, but that was not really the case.

They were simply Taiwanese products paired with Japanese text; when creating the graphics, you still had to use the same kind of design as for e-commerce.

Before I joined, they said I could use any software I wanted. In the end, they still required me to use AI, because they supposedly knew how to use AI better.

But in reality, they did not know how to use it better. I had to explain AI's functions to them like teaching kindergarten children who were using chopsticks for the first time.

Their Photoshop was the 2014 version, and the 2014 version does not support adding new artboards.

If you want to use a newer version of Photoshop, you have to handle it yourself. A single design project might require seven or eight images; if you open one file for each image, you will definitely go crazy. I genuinely recommend bringing your own Photoshop 2015 or later.

The server is very small. After working on a file, you may have to wait fifteen minutes or more just to upload it to the server. If you do anything on the computer during the upload, it may freeze on you. When you open the performance monitor, you find that the GPU and CPU are both above 80% usage, while you have no idea which software is consuming the resources.

Once the upload finishes, you might as well celebrate your grandchild's one-month birthday celebration. That is probably the only thing to be thankful for.

And despite running the business for so many years, the owner does not know how to use Photoshop, so you have to teach him on the spot. It really makes you question your life choices.

Another major problem is that their file backups are incomplete.

According to the owner, they were hit by ransomware a few years ago, which is why some files are missing or incomplete.

This is the direct reason the work takes so long.

Sometimes you may need to find file A. You see a folder labeled A and click into it, only to discover that the file is corrupted and cannot be opened.

I almost never found a file successfully on the first try.

Looking for a file was like searching for a long-lost family member: you see someone who looks similar and rush over to ask, only to find that it is not them at all.

They also had no intention of replacing the missing files or retaking the photos. If the resolution was poor, you had to retake the photos yourself.

That said, their DSLR camera was fairly good, and the owner seemed knowledgeable about cameras. This was a rare and valuable advantage.

With no assets and no photos, the result was that you had to create a whole mountain of assets yourself.

It took an enormous amount of time, and then they would tell you that you were too slow.

It was like asking a chef to cook while the restaurant provided only the kitchen utensils and expected the chef to somehow produce the ingredients. Not even a master chef could do that.

Everything had to be redone from scratch, as if the company had suddenly appeared on the day you joined.

They have a large number of products, but mainly sell only a few of them; the rest seem to exist simply for the sake of having them.

The large number of products did not have functional descriptions. Every time you needed to create graphics, you had to listen to the owner explain the product verbally again. You had to listen to him explain each product every time you worked on it, making you feel as though you had arrived at an Apple product launch.

Files might stop opening after sitting there for a few days. Putting a file on the server was like your child receiving a draft notice and going off to war: it would not be surprising if it died one day without warning.

I have no idea whether their server has actually been fixed, so please develop the habit of making backups.

Previously, when looking at the product images on their official website and partner sales channels, I noticed severe image damage (mosaic artifacts, severe distortion, and images that were too small). At first, I wondered how such basic mistakes could happen.

Later I discovered that after an employee found an image file too large,

he would go online, find an image-compression website, and shrink it, which caused distortion.

Moreover, whenever anything went wrong with an image, he would not tell you; he would simply convert the file directly.

In all my years working in e-commerce, this was the first time I had encountered someone uploading images to an unknown website for compression—and the owner had never even noticed.

The owner would even ask you why the image looked like that after being uploaded online.

Summary:

I do not actually think this company was seriously trying to recruit someone. After I started, they had to install PHOTOSHOP on the computer for me, and the computer's performance did not meet the requirements either. Opening a piece of software would make the screen turn white, and saving a file meant waiting until the end of time. They even only began organizing the desktop I had seen during the interview after I started.

On my first day, the computer crashed and had to be reinstalled. I genuinely felt sorry for that computer.

After joining, I repeatedly asked them for work regulations, but they never gave me any, as though workplace rules did not exist.

From joining to termination, everything seemed to follow a script: praising and approving my work during the interview, wildly inflating the salary promises, then criticizing me and demanding endless revisions after I joined. Everything was carried out in an orderly fashion.

After being terminated, I asked them for overtime pay.

(Yes, this company requires overtime. The overtime is not long, but they make you work a little every day to squeeze extra time out of you.)

They said it was a responsibility-based work system and refused to pay.

When I asked for severance pay, they said there was no severance during the probationary period. Only after I cited the relevant legal provisions were they willing to pay.

They also calculated labor and health insurance contributions as a full month both when I joined and when I left. I had to spend time providing the legal provisions before they would calculate them properly.

A company that refuses to straightforwardly pay even a small amount of severance and related fees can nevertheless paint a beautiful, effortless picture of the job before you join. That is something I have to give them considerable credit for.

The only advantage was that the owner's wife was thoughtful and very intelligent. She could properly explain what was needed and offer practical suggestions.

The owner, however, expected you to use telepathy to guess, then kept saying, “You understand what I mean, right?”

I do not even know whether a ten-dollar coin lands heads or tails when tossed forward, yet the owner expected employees to be like Conan and solve everything through deduction.

The employees there also had a habit of muttering to themselves, loudly enough to affect your work. Their emotional management was problematic as well. Between joining and leaving, I twice encountered situations where someone, after being reprimanded by the owner, ran downstairs and shouted and screamed. You had no choice but to endure it.

Everything mentioned above is factual. I can only truthfully report the situations I actually encountered. If this can save even one person, it is worth it.

If you have read this far and are still thinking of going to an interview—or even starting work there—all I can say is that your courage is commendable.