Workplace reviews and discussion: 南誠羽毛實業股份有限公司

Free meals (the boxed lunches are extremely greasy)

Air conditioning

The computers run fairly fast

A motorcycle is provided (you have to pay for the fuel yourself / model: Feng 100)

As a foodie, working at this company was psychological torture. You can poison my mind, but you must not poison my taste buds. So, during my first week of being poisoned, I gave the meat from my boxed lunch to the auntie to feed to the dogs. Another week later, I had to take stomach medicine with my meals—the medicine tasted better than the food. And then after that… I resigned (lol). I strongly suggest that all companies make sure their boxed lunches taste better.

Now, about my work: I had to do everything under the sun. I needed to know PS and AI, and because the company makes bedding, I also had to understand the characteristics of various fiber fabrics and printing methods in order to communicate with vendors about prototypes. The company clearly wanted to create a high-end brand for department-store counters, yet it could only find digital-printing vendors who could print synthetic fibers, so the hand feel was terrible. My supervisor even asked, “It’s not that bad, is it? It feels like Tencel.” Hearing that nearly made me faint. Asking someone who can distinguish the hand feel of different fibers to accept that was truly excruciatingly awkward. Eventually, an agent for a yarn manufacturer was willing to help us find a downstream textile producer. But during the entire meeting, my supervisor spent almost all of his time pitching our own products to the other party’s sales representative, without mentioning the method of cooperation, discussing fabric samples, or talking about the budget at all. You could say there was almost no progress in the meeting. The above is just a small complaint about my actual job. Next, let me talk about my side job—the unpaid kind.

Before I joined this company, three people had already resigned, and none of them had lasted more than a year. When I joined, the sales representative left, so I had to help my supervisor check emails and forward him materials marked “1111,” call people to arrange interviews for him (half an HR role), and print contracts for him (half a secretary’s role). After printing the contracts, I also had to run them through the approval process. Here’s the key point: he couldn’t fill in the basic information that had to be provided on the contracts, so you had to fill it in for him. And it wasn’t as simple as him giving you the information to enter. He expected you to figure it out yourself. After spending most of the day processing a contract and confirming its details with other managers (half a legal role), and then stamping it with the company seal in the office, he would finally throw out a remark like: “Why are you always in other people’s offices? That’s not right.” After all that hard work processing a contract, my supervisor would take his colleagues off to wander around some train art festival, then question my loyalty. Who could keep doing this? That was my experience after serving as half a secretary, half a legal affairs officer, and half an HR person.

Also, during meetings, a presentation that was clearly only supposed to take three minutes could drag on for three hours (exhausting). A question that was clearly “yes or no” could turn into pouring motivational clichés about not thinking negatively onto subordinates. I simply couldn’t swallow it. Then, even after the meeting concluded that a certain design would be used as the gift, once the prototype was finished, he would say, “Oh, we’re using this one? We should have used the classic version. It’s fine—let’s just use this one.” Forget the hindsight criticism; it had clearly been brought up, discussed, and approved during the meeting, only for him to criticize it afterward. All I could do was laugh.

In short, if you think you can handle being a full-time product designer/graphic designer plus half an HR person, half a legal affairs officer, and half a legal affairs officer, you can come try this company. Of course, my strongest recommendation is still: don’t join. If you do join, escape quickly. Best of luck to us all.