Workplace reviews and discussion: 滇景圖像多媒體有限公司

On-time departure: You can almost always leave work at 5:30 p.m.

Great location: In a prime area of Taipei City. By bus, there are many stops along Ren’ai Road; by MRT, both the Blue Line (Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall) and the Red Line (Xinyi Anhe) are within a 10-minute walk.

Many food options: There are numerous delivery services and physical restaurants. Most are mid- to high-priced, but if you look carefully, there are also quite a few affordable options.

1. Unclear division of responsibilities: The team is small, consisting of the boss, a producer, a video editor based in southern Taiwan, and a part-time photographer. The remaining employees (photographers, designers, and planners) have an extremely high turnover rate, and after six months there are almost no experienced employees left. A small team may seem to offer the opportunity to be exposed to and participate in the entire video production process, but in practice, regardless of position, most working hours are wasted on trivial tasks (even administrative chores that could simply be handled by an intern are assigned to full-time employees; more on this below). The actual work performed after joining often differs greatly from the duties described during the interview. Later on, due to staff shortages, an employee who had never operated a camera before might even be asked to control the camera on the spot. A pre-shoot meeting? Sorry, regardless of the scale of the project, there is no such arrangement here.

2. Chaotic scheduling: Employees have many tasks on hand, but they receive no meaningful support or explanation from management regarding priorities or urgency. Everything depends on the boss’s mood. The most common instruction received in the morning is: “Can you give me the xx project by o’clock this morning (in less than an hour)/this afternoon? There’s a client meeting.” It would be understandable if this happened occasionally, but it may happen two or three times within a single week. If you raise questions or suggest improvements, the boss responds with questions such as, “Why do you have so many questions?” or “You just need to trust me and do what I say.” If you happen to catch him in a bad mood, he may even respond with emotional language. Asking about the deadline when receiving an assignment is not much help either; you will usually get vague replies such as “As soon as possible” or “It’s not that urgent.”

There may also be business trips for filming work, which is understandable, but during the interview this is only mentioned casually, with no discussion of the frequency or duration of trips. In practice, it is common to be suddenly told that filming will take place in another county or city the next day, or that an overnight business trip to a remote area is required. Employees can hardly learn about the relevant plans or schedule before arriving on-site (asking does not help either). Since filming often runs into various human or non-human complications, work may not end until very late, which also significantly affects employees’ personal arrangements after work.

3. Poor internal communication: As mentioned above, the company is very lean, so communication and discussion should theoretically be more efficient. However, employees in every position consistently agree that there are major obstacles to communicating with management. Whether in design or planning, a project often leads to endless, directionless revisions and wasted work because of unexplained instructions, shifting aesthetic standards with no objective basis, or claims such as “the client suddenly changed their mind.” Similar situations frequently occur with the other member of management, the producer. An employee may be assigned a task, complete it, and submit it for confirmation, only to be told afterward by the producer, “You did it wrong; that’s not right.” The reasons may be extraordinarily perplexing, such as “I didn’t know it had been revised properly before—I hadn’t seen it,” or “I forgot to tell you that OO also needed to be changed.”

For tasks requiring the participation of the entire company, such as filming or in-person events, management also inexplicably dislikes explaining the process or instructions to employees in advance. As a result, unnecessary waste of manpower and resources—problems that could have been prevented beforehand—often occurs during the process. Since these situations happen far too frequently, all employees have repeatedly raised with the boss during weekly meetings or individual work-review meetings the hope that the company could establish smoother internal communication channels. However, there has never been any meaningful improvement or response.

4. Unclear company goals: During the interview, it was mentioned that, in addition to public tenders, the company handled projects of various types. In practice, however, 90% of the work consists of projects for a particular government department. Because the company has so few employees, it can devote all its resources to this project during certain periods. If there were concrete planning and arrangements, finishing Project A before moving on to Project B would not be a problem. However, as described above, employees have no idea about the overall direction, such as project schedules or priorities. They can only randomly accept various work assignments from management, while continually spending huge amounts of time and communication costs on pointless tasks.

Many trivial administrative duties that could clearly be assigned to interns (such as transcribing recordings word for word) are presumably handled this way because there is no proper planning. The company can only take things one step at a time, robbing Peter to pay Paul: wherever work is falling behind, employees are all required to put aside their current tasks and spend 70–80% of their working time dealing with it, with various unexpected assignments occasionally interspersed. Combined with the poor communication, over the long term it becomes genuinely impossible to understand how doing this work benefits employees’ personal growth or the company’s future.

Summary: This job requires extremely quick and flexible problem-solving skills. If you consider yourself physically strong and healthy, mild-mannered, without any long-term plans for the future, living near Ren’ai Road in Taipei City, having no fulfilling personal life or social gatherings after work, and able to accommodate business trips unconditionally, this job is perfect for you—submit your résumé now!