Workplace reviews and discussion: 禾橙視覺設計有限公司

Fully remote work

1. Work assignments: This is a fully remote job. During the interview, they said it required a lot of creativity and aesthetic sense, repeatedly emphasizing how important these were. In reality, there were no corresponding projects where I could make use of them. Personally, I don't discriminate between large and small projects—as long as I can earn money, either is fine—but I don't understand why this husband-and-wife management team had to make such grand promises. For example, the projects were things like menus for snack shops, book layouts, and business cards. The male boss was mainly responsible for bringing in projects, while the female boss reviewed them. Each time, the male boss would provide an extremely brief written description and expect the designer to start working. The female boss often didn't even know the full details of the project, yet would come in and give her opinions, asking what style the client wanted. The two of them would also complain that you were being too wordy and asking too many questions, implying, “You’re the designer—don’t you know?” Moreover, the project information was very opaque, and they were afraid you might find out how much the projects were worth, claiming that someone had stolen client information in the past. In short, they were extremely distrustful, though I felt it was completely unnecessary. I also take on freelance projects myself, and I would never handle them this way.

Let me ask everyone: If all you receive for a business card is a name, what kind of design can you create? Designers create work based on clients’ needs. I suggest they hire a “psychic” rather than a “designer.” Giving designers enough creative room requires providing them with “information”—not failing to communicate properly with the client when taking on the project and then claiming that this gives the designer a lo～t～o～f～r～o～o～m～f～o～r～d～e～s～i～g～n. Please don’t obscure the fact that your own project-communication skills are poor. The husband and wife even said, “If we keep asking questions, the client will have a lot of opinions. I don’t want them to have opinions.”

2. Work environment: Approximately one or two video meetings per week, with online clock-ins.

3. Benefits and conditions: None whatsoever.

4. Time expenditure: Design work was frequently sent back and forth and rejected by the female boss, interrupted by urgent projects from the male boss, and then rejected by the client in the end. The workflow was extremely chaotic. Both of them also had very poor emotional intelligence and frequently used emotional language. They believed they did not like small clients and therefore should not let clients have opinions, but ultimately they could not handle the clients in business matters, and the clients still had opinions. Do they think the people paying them are stupid? The husband and wife would then blame the designer for being inefficient, claiming that you worked too slowly and dumping all the blame on you. They were completely typical exploitative bosses—no matter what happened, it was always the employee’s fault.

I applied for a fully remote position. The husband and wife played good cop and bad cop. At first, they said that because the company was located in Yunlin and had always trained university graduates, and because fresh graduates were difficult to work with, they wanted to try remote work and find an experienced visual designer in Taipei.

I have experience both at small companies with fewer than 10 employees and at large companies with more than 200 employees. I joined this company because I wanted to try fully remote work, but I want to warn anyone else interested in fully remote positions to be careful. When you join this company, they give you many documents, such as confidentiality agreements, to sign. The penalty for disclosure can be as high as NT$500,000. I have worked at seven companies and have never seen such an intimidating contract. Moreover, the company’s projects were all very small—projects worth only a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. On what basis could they impose a penalty of NT$500,000?

Finally, after I had worked there for about a month, the husband and wife had originally both been very friendly. They even said that several of my logo proposals were excellent and asked me to write down the design concepts so they could follow them when presenting the proposals. However, three days before payday, their attitudes suddenly changed completely. They even sent me a long string of LINE messages saying that my performance was worse than a fresh graduate’s, that a business card could be completed in five hours, and that a university student could finish a book layout in a few hours. Everyone, if you are also a designer, you should understand that if the layout file is not provided as an INDD file but as an AI file with the text converted to outlines, it is not as quick as simply replacing the text; even every line has to be rearranged. It was obvious that they were complaining three days before payday because they did not want to pay my wages or wanted to deduct them. In the end, they even created a bizarre Google Form saying that, in the future, mistakes causing losses to the company would be penalized at 20%–30% of the project’s losses. I asked them about it, but the husband and wife said that project quotes were confidential and employees did not know the amounts. How was I supposed to know whether there had actually been a loss, and how much 20%–30% would be?

That is the full account of the frightening events I experienced over this little more than a month. Anyone with common sense can figure out whether this is a company worth joining.