The salary is standard, and the benefits are fairly good; for a small or medium-sized enterprise, they are reasonable and unremarkable.

Colleagues are easy to get along with, and there are also plenty of opportunities to interact with clients, including government agencies, museums, foundations, and others, through work.

In all fairness, if you simply want to work for a salary, or do not need a sense of career achievement from your job and instead treat it as an interest, this is a reasonable option to consider.

The department is young, so someone with no relevant academic or professional background was parachuted in to take charge of the business. The manager tries to save the company money, so sometimes reasonable employee requests for work-related consumables, transportation costs, business-trip meals, and other relatively minor expenses are blocked by the manager and never reported upward. As a result, sometimes requests are approved and sometimes they are not.

(In simple terms, whether employees can spend company money or expect a raise depends on the manager’s mood and memory.)

The manager was parachuted in, and the department is run according to personal authority; consequently, the manager can spend working hours buying tea ware, brewing tea, doing rehabilitation exercises, and so on—because the manager does not have to clock in or out. The manager always claims to be the busiest person, the earliest to arrive, and the latest to leave, while treating it as an employee’s expected contribution whenever an employee leaves later than the manager.

All this power can also be understood simply as the boss not wanting to deal with matters personally.

The manager’s busiest task on projects is arbitrarily calculating how to squeeze out and further reduce project staffing. (However, the workload and schedule required by the project are fixed.)

The next priority is changing the font in reports. As for the content, it is full of typographical errors, so those errors are not corrected; the manager also does not understand the other professional substance, and therefore cannot revise the content or arrange a “feasible” schedule.

Professional quality is not important. The manager only cares about the project’s numbers each day, and regardless of how much is produced, always considers the output too slow (because the manager considers project work superficial). Even after a situation has been explained to the manager, the same questions will be asked repeatedly. When the manager encounters a problem in a project that cannot be solved independently, the manager would rather keep going around in circles using their own method until time runs out than listen to other people’s suggestions.

Simply put, the company is not particularly bad, but the problem is that the lack of a proper system has led to a personality-driven management approach; this is also the consensus among most people.

And I believe this is not the only company in Taiwan like this.