You can go in there to pad your résumé, and once you come out, lots of people will want you.

One person is used as three, and cross-functional support is the norm, so after you leave, you’ll find that you can never finish writing down all your résumé experience.

After leaving here, you’ll learn how to judge whether a company is actually a workplace minefield. The more a company touts itself as a happy, positive workplace, the more problems it tends to have.

The worst and most awful things in the workplace all happen here. Once you leave, you’ll feel very content and realize how precious it is to find a normal company.

Quite a few colleagues felt deeply disappointed in this company after joining. They became disillusioned with and even somewhat afraid of B Corporations. The male founder (not the one responsible for the sprouts) has very poor emotional control and often verbally berates employees in extremely harsh language. Profanities are extremely frequent, and he also forces employees to apologize repeatedly. There is also serious educational discrimination. He attacks people rather than addressing issues; although everything seems fine on the surface, he verbally attacks colleagues in certain meetings. He also deliberately sows discord among employees, intentionally creating conflicts between them so they will not unite to resist him. His view of frontline employees is that they are disposable chopsticks; the people who do the actual work have no value.

There is nothing wrong with the male founder driving luxury cars, appearing in BMW advertisements, or having his wife and children wear designer brands. The problem is that he mocks colleagues for carrying designer handbags, pretending to be above it all and uninterested in luxury brands, when in fact he simply dislikes seeing other people wearing or carrying them. He himself is obsessed with them.

The company rents two floors in the CTBC Building, one on the 10th floor and one on the 17th floor. Departments on different floors are forced to swap floors several times a year on a regular basis because the male founder is very superstitious about feng shui. He believes that staying on the same floor as the marketing department for too long will use up that floor’s good fortune, which is why everyone is made to go through all this trouble moving back and forth. He apparently does not realize that the company’s many problems are actually caused by people. Stop catering to feng shui.

The male founder is already 43, yet he still loves telling employees that Shannie Chen once called him a guitar prodigy. He also loves bringing up the title he supposedly won as the logic champion in some kind of logic competition.

This is the worst place for workplace PUA. Although it calls itself a B Corporation and has even received recognition from HR Asia, turnover is extremely high. Some colleagues leave less than two weeks after joining, while colleagues who do not pass their probation are quietly made to disappear.

Departing colleagues are often PUAed into thinking they were not good enough to stay. In reality, the demands of this environment are unreasonably high, and the pay is not commensurate. To former colleagues who happen to see this: please stop thinking you are inadequate. You are wonderful. This place is emotionally blackmailing and exploiting you. I hope you can break free.

There is a soapbox (morning meeting) every morning from Monday through Friday. The theme is different each day; for example, Monday is called Positive Monday, when everyone has to share something from the previous week that made them feel positive about work.

Attendance is not recorded by clocking in. You have to be inside the online meeting, and only once you are seated at your desk does it count as clocking in. Leaving work is based on a responsibility system, so everyone works excessive overtime. Department managers do not take leave, so the people below them do not dare to take leave either. Many people clearly want to take leave but are afraid to, because taking leave frequently will lead to relentless questioning, along with PUA tactics telling you that if you cannot finish your work, it means you are incompetent.

If you unfortunately just joined this company and encounter adjustment problems at work, do not use HR’s consultation chat feature—do not use it, under any circumstances. After using it a few times, you may be labeled and warned that continued use could lead them to question whether you are suitable for the company. HR will also ask colleagues in your department to observe you.

There are constant internal changes, and urgent tasks come up very easily. However, these urgent tasks often turn out to have been delayed by specific people.

There have been several sexual-harassment incidents within the company, but the perpetrators were not fired.

If you plan to intern here, be prepared to be assigned miscellaneous chores or forced to do work on the same scale as full-time employees. You will not be paid much, but there is guaranteed to be an especially large amount of bullshit.

For such a large company, general affairs and legal work are handled as side duties by colleagues with no relevant background. Even buying office snacks and watering the plants have to be shared among other employees.

Every year in July and August, there is an employee-purchase competition, and employees are given sales targets. All full-time employees must participate, including those who are not in sales. It feels a lot like multilevel marketing, although internally they tell you the activity is intended to help colleagues better understand the products.

You are also forced to place orders. If you do not participate, the other members of your team may be unable to receive their bonuses...

One year, the company’s spring banquet involved taking a tour bus from the office to Tamsui at noon. We did not eat all day, and in the afternoon we had to dance (Cloud Gate Dance Theatre). Some people had to perform on stage, followed by a long, tedious series of company milestones, best employee awards, and calling employees’ names. We did not get home until 9 or 10 p.m., and still had to work the next day. There was a raffle, but the prizes were terrible, and you had to have been a full-time employee for at least a year to enter. The good prizes seemed to have been predetermined. The entire banquet was full of emotional blackmail and praise for certain people.

This year’s spring banquet was held at the Le Méridien Taipei. They kept saying the company had achieved record-high performance, but when it came time to pay out money, they could not produce it. The raffle had a bonus mechanism in which the longer you had worked there, the more likely you were to win. The male founder himself won NT$30,000 and received only an additional NT$10,000. The funny thing is that half the employees in the room had been with the company for less than a year.

Only after leaving did I suddenly realize: “The secret to this company being able to call itself a startup for 12 years is that one batch of employees replaces another—an eternally renewed startup.”

After resigning and interviewing at many places, I learned that stories about my former company had already spread throughout the industry.