Workplace reviews and discussion: 南藝創意工程股份有限公司

There are no advantages—low-skill odd jobs; as long as you can follow orders, that's enough.

The job opening did not match the actual work. In reality, because the company only had the supervisor and the boss, the role would almost immediately turn into other work after joining. None of this was clearly explained to interviewees. The same thing repeatedly happened to new hires, increasing staff turnover. The miscellaneous tasks assigned did not require any particularly high level of technical skill and were even overly simple (I applied for a technical position). The difficulty was that there were no processes and no efficiency: every workflow required constantly chasing the boss for confirmation, and there were even last-minute deadline crises. One day before the delivery date promised to a client, they were still looking for a vendor. Because things were so rushed, the boss suddenly asked me to figure something out. I apologize to the vendors I asked strange questions of; any normal person knows it was impossible to complete the work in time. The boss even used “because we’re a team” to convince employees that assigning these cross-disciplinary tasks was reasonable.

The boss had a reliable network for sourcing projects—so reliable that a company that had genuinely done its homework could lose to an empty castle with no preparation whatsoever. “Say it first, then figure out a way” was exactly the boss’s way of doing things.

The company atmosphere was strange. It looked as though they understood technology, but even the computer software was outdated, and there was no shared cloud system. The supervisor even moved the old computers of former colleagues one by one to search for files. There were many workstations in the office, yet “no one” was there. During the interview, I asked why I could not see anyone, and the boss falsely claimed that everyone had gone out to work. When I probed about what colleagues there would be, the boss said they would be hiring various people. Perhaps the boss was simply too persuasive, so I did not realize at the time that these were ghost colleagues who would never actually appear.

When I went there, I discovered that the company was in contact with lawyers and the courts. Outside, there was also a scrapped car with a badly smashed hood. On one occasion, I rode in the boss’s car and found that the boss drove dangerously: he could look to the right at videos on his phone, with both hands off the steering wheel. Internal employees had to keep contacting the boss repeatedly in order to get anything done, and the boss would confirm things while driving. The car was like its driver—drifting left and right, unpredictable and ever-changing.

Things agreed upon the previous day would be abandoned the next day, and this happened repeatedly. The boss also loved holding meetings—one in the morning and another in the afternoon. Once, during a meeting, he said the office had to be cleaned thoroughly so that he would be in a good mood and would not lose his temper (the company did not employ a cleaner). I really did see him suddenly lose his temper; he threw and hit things.

The company had established subsidiaries. One of them was called Mingqian, and I heard there were others as well.

The supervisor appeared to have been there for a long time, but was constantly surrounded by new colleagues who would stop appearing after just a few days. The company often hired part-time students to look for vendor information, and its internal operations were extremely bizarre.