Workplace reviews and discussion: 舨舍空間設計有限公司

Employee outings every year

Occasional employee dinners (but they make you really not want to go)

Strongly advise against it. This is a very traditional company with an extremely serious and strange hierarchy. The director and manager are a married couple who act like exploitative old-school bosses, with highly controlling personalities. Anyone who is not willing to be completely submissive will suffer greatly here. Apart from the director, the entire company consists of women, and they only hire female employees (probably because they are afraid that someone with this kind of personality would be confronted by a man). The people who stay are either severely submissive workaholics or women with little sense of self or personal opinion. Basically, the entire company revolves around the director, who is emotionally sensitive like a little girl who has not grown up yet and feels that the whole world looks down on him.

As for the work environment, the company is unbelievably small and extremely cramped. Each person’s desk is only 58 centimeters wide (I still remember it to this day…). Even turning around would cause you to bump into the chair of the colleague next to you, and the aisle is only wide enough for one person to pass through.

Arriving at 9:01 a.m. counts as being late. Every day, there are all kinds of explicit and implicit demands to work overtime, and it is normal for everyone to leave after 8 or 9 p.m. There is no overtime pay. They think this is how they train you, because they went through the same thing in the past. They will tell employees that giving everyone job opportunities is their favor to us.

The so-called “designers” are merely assistants who draw the sketches and construction drawings for the director (the director cannot do computer drafting at all). Every small design decision has to be run by him, and each person has to line up every day to ask him design-related questions. If you have not designed a drawing first, he will wonder why you are not using your brain to think about the design. But if you design the drawing first, he will scold you for not asking him beforehand and ask whether you are disrespecting him… A designer once helped an assistant carry something upstairs and was harshly reprimanded for lacking ethics; apparently, assistants are supposed to help designers, not the other way around.

The director is extremely proud and conceited, with deeply entrenched patriarchal thinking, his own strange sense of ethics, and an inexplicable sense of superiority. If he enters the company or you enter the company without greeting him, you will immediately be called in for a talk and reminded that you failed to greet him and lack ethics. He requires everyone to be lively and cheerful and to smile. Basically, everyone has been called in for a talk by him (during lunch break). The company is extremely authoritarian. The director will take the lead in speaking badly about absent colleagues to other colleagues when they are not around. When he comes into the company at lunchtime, he keeps chatting with employees (about boring stories involving his potted plants and so on…), unknowingly taking up their meal time. Listening to his stories does not make the lunch break any longer. His attitude toward employees is to criticize them no matter what, nitpicking over every single thing, while believing that he is teaching you and that his willingness to teach you is a favor.

In short, after going through the experience, I was left deeply shaken. It is an extremely strange company… If you stay here for a long time, your values and self-image may be seriously affected. There are plenty of design companies out there; you really do not need to come here to torment yourself.