1. Working hours are 8:30–18:00, with a flexible half-hour window. You can go out to take care of personal matters during work hours, and there’s no need to work overtime. You can even say you’re leaving first during a meeting and head out.

2. Designers use new Macs, and the office chairs are also high-end.

3. The department often orders afternoon tea using company funds.

4. Having a real-estate-related license can qualify you for a salary increase.

1. Company culture

New hires are required to watch training videos that, on the one hand, promote how extraordinary the group and its chairman are, while on the other hand berating and attacking competitors. They even use competitors’ founders’ names as nicknames, with a mocking tone. It’s quite tasteless; attacking others won’t help you improve—it only makes you look petty. Administrative meetings recognize employees who recommend friends or relatives to join the company and have them share how they recruited people. They also chant slogans and sing battle songs, with lyrics about “kill, kill, kill” and the like. It’s no different from a multi-level marketing company.

2. Office environment

For a major group that calls itself a real-estate leader, renting an old building feels rather undignified. The environment is dim and outdated, the restrooms are often dirty, messy, and clogged, and cockroaches even scurry around inside the coffee machine. The elevators are also extremely slow and difficult to catch.

3. Relationships with colleagues

There are some very capable colleagues in the design department who spend most of their working hours chatting or going out to handle personal matters, push their work onto others, and still keep getting promoted—I sincerely admire them. Some are highly aggressive, lack the ability to back it up, yet love telling others what to do; they are complete clowns making fools of themselves. Still, most colleagues are quite friendly on the surface and willing to help, so the atmosphere isn’t too bad.

4. Attendance and leave

I don’t know how other departments operate, but the design manager really likes asking about the reasons for taking leave. For annual leave, they ask where you’re going and what you’re doing; for sick leave, they ask what illness you have and which department you’re seeing. Once, I heard them ask a female colleague, “Are you on your period?” I was completely dumbfounded. Oh, and the manager is a middle-aged man.

5. Company information security

You can’t access the external internet or connect a USB drive to transfer files, but you can bring your own iPad and use AirDrop. Information-security briefings are held frequently, but the main message is that you must not discuss your own projects with the colleague next to you because they might tell a competitor (lol). That’s when I realized information security here actually means confidentiality and counterespionage, not cybersecurity.

6. Department management

I can only speak for the department I worked in: the manager’s evaluations are based neither on ability nor results, but entirely on personal preference. If you question them, you’ll lose points. Once you’re on their bad side, you’ll stay there forever; your performance rating will never recover, and your year-end bonus will be several months’ worth less than those of the manager’s favorites. Even winning an award for a project you participated in won’t help. The manager loves having everyone conduct design comparisons and vote, but regardless of the result, they always end up using the design they voted for. Although the manager says they have a design background, after several meetings I couldn’t help feeling that they lacked design sense and didn’t really understand their colleagues’ areas of expertise.

5. Other

This is a company that likes prying into people’s privacy. During interviews, you’re required to provide detailed information about your family members, including their phone numbers and occupations. They even ask whether you plan to have children (what business is that of theirs, anyway?). They also repeatedly confirm whether you know anyone who has worked as a real-estate agent. At first, I thought it was bizarre, but after looking into it, I found out that they had apparently sent a spy to steal confidential information from a competitor and the spy was caught. Maybe that’s why they assume others will send spies too—what a joke. After joining, you also have to submit a pile of strange documents, including detailed household registration records for your parents. I don’t know what any of this has to do with the job.

As long as you end up in the right department with the right manager and can put up with the company culture, this is a place where you can coast until retirement.