Workplace reviews and discussion: COWA_和展貿易有限公司

So far, I haven’t felt that this company has any advantages at all. They want to treat one person as if they were three... This is my honest opinion, no exaggeration!

After seeing comments from people who worked here five years ago, I initially didn’t believe them. But after joining this company, I really did find it inexplicably strange. On my first day, I could already feel how lifeless the atmosphere was. Of the office seats near the door where new arrivals reported, only two people were sitting motionless. After I stood there for a few seconds, a woman in her forties sitting in the back slowly got up and, with an unfriendly expression, told me to write this and put it on the desk without speaking to me. The accountant is also the boss’s informant. She probably doesn’t have much work, and her emotional management is not very good either. She spent the entire afternoon scrolling on her phone—really impressive. Compared with the person next to me, who seemed very busy, the workload made the workplace inequality obvious.

You can really feel the pressure. The person I dealt with was a young, short female supervisor. During the process, I could tell that she didn’t understand some aspects of the company very well—ask A, and she answers B. When I asked her about things I didn’t understand, her explanation was very different from what I needed to know. She said she would hand over the design work I had done before, but all I can say is: How could this have passed? The basic files were astonishingly incomplete, and they were still using CS5. If they knew how to handle things, shouldn’t they have made improvements before someone else arrived? During the interview, they even had the nerve to say that job seekers could use their own computers, and then immediately said no. I never imagined it would be this bad—it’s completely neglected. Don’t expect too much from a company that neither seeks innovation nor change.

Tasks that were not mentioned during the interview were listed on the job responsibilities without any embarrassment. I asked clearly about the job scope, so I remembered it. After I pointed this out, she actually said that I might encounter those tasks later, which was why she listed them. She said her starting point was that the company hoped everyone who joined could give things a try. She also said that before the company brought in a third person, we should first have a well-established performance record. (What on earth is she talking about?!）

Shouldn’t they hire someone who actually knows marketing? Everything she says is about how to save money, or whether opening an e-commerce business really needs to cost that much. When a company talks about saving money from top to bottom, isn’t that basically the mindset of an exploitative old-school boss? She even kept arguing that they never specifically required us to do those things, while also failing to provide a complete handover and still expecting me to do a whole bunch of work... She has been at the company for a long time. From the Facebook photos, I often saw that if she wasn’t photographing the models, she herself was in the photos. I gradually realized that she is probably the company owner’s daughter! No wonder she could come in late at noon and work at night. I’m not entirely sure which female supervisor she was referring to, so it started to feel rather mysterious. But there really was a female supervisor in the innermost area whose office seat was blocked by a folding screen. She was also an employee who had worked at the company for over 20 years, and I really didn’t know what she was doing—she seemed to have almost nothing to do most of the time. There were also many office seats in front of her, but they were all empty. Perhaps many people had worked there in the past but left, or perhaps they simply wanted one person to do everyone else’s work. The warehouse really felt like a home-based subcontracting operation. Many things were done based on the idea that you would “know how after doing it for a long time.” Even just storing items was extremely chaotic; there was absolutely no system. I feel that they don’t understand their own products very well, or that they simply don’t want to tell prospective employees too much. The brand is clearly not from Japan, yet they pretend it is a Japanese brand. In fact, the products are made in Taiwan—and some are even manufactured in mainland China—while they deceive people by claiming the place of origin is Hong Kong. They are seriously misleading consumers and don’t seem to think there is anything wrong with it. No wonder someone who was supposed to join before me eventually ran away, probably after discovering what the company was really like. Later, I found that the position had also changed into an “E-commerce Marketing and Graphic/Visual Design Specialist” role. Even after they find someone, they may keep the position posted indefinitely; perhaps if things don’t go smoothly or the person has too many of their own ideas, they simply keep looking while someone is already employed. Really think twice before accepting this job. This is a company with no intention of changing, and they may even blame you for mistakes by saying that your abilities are inadequate.