A decades-old company, a large enterprise with several hundred employees.

A traditional-industry system, responsibility-based working hours, salary depends on luck, and opportunities to learn about different fields—for example, working as a cleaner or newspaper delivery person.

Some colleagues are crazy, others are ill; supervisors just talk and paint you a rosy picture. It can train your self-cultivation and emotional management.

Suitable for people who are natural actors and good at flattering supervisors—you will do very well here.

1. You have to sneak into major universities to distribute flyers, write on blackboards, and organize seminars.

2. As mentioned above, when organizing seminars, you have to pay for the refreshments upfront yourself (NT$100 per student; 40 students means NT$4,000). You only get reimbursed several weeks later.

2. As mentioned above, organizing seminars means playing cat and mouse with the school’s security center, because schools will not lend you classrooms. (During my first week on the job, I was scolded by a school officer and kicked off campus.)

I urge people with an overflowing sense of justice not to work in school-channel sales.

3. For the General Scholastic Ability Test, Comprehensive Assessment Program, and any civil-service examinations, you will be dragged in to work for free distributing DMs.

4. I heard from senior colleagues that performance bonuses used to be better; the commission rate could reach double-digit percentages, but now it is a pitiful single-digit percentage.

5. They keep shouting about declining birth rates and asking everyone to share the burden, but apparently revenue has not dropped.

6. The company’s upper management is also similar to a family business, but it is difficult to hear the gossip.

7. The mentor system for new hires cannot really be called good or bad, because it depends entirely on who your mentor is and whether they keep things to themselves.

8. There are tons of meaningless meetings. If your performance is not up to target, you have to go up and give a self-criticism report. I heard that in the past, these had to be written. (I would rather write one than be publicly judged onstage.)

9. I have absolutely no idea how the supervisors make decisions. Today they say we are going to the North Pole, so we go to the North Pole; tomorrow they say we are going to the South Pole, so we go to the South Pole. You need excellent survival and adaptability skills.

10. During the interview, they say most colleagues are around the same age as you (almost all under 30). After joining, you realize that this is actually because the retention rate is too low.

11. You have to bring your own toilet paper. Your coworkers will hear the sounds when you poop, unless you never poop at the company.

12. Your self-esteem is often undermined here. Although the scolding does not go as far as personal attacks, you will be subjected to PUA-style manipulation—for example, being told, “With your abilities, you’re already doing pretty well here. You definitely wouldn’t earn this much in an outside job, and it would be harder.” Or your supervisor will compare you with others and manipulate you: “Look at so-and-so. They did NT$** ten-thousand in sales this month and even came in specially to work overtime and serve students on holidays,” and so on.

13. Supervisors will take the lead in isolating new hires they dislike. Group-work schedules are not transparent, creating information gaps that make it impossible to coordinate work.

After a while, you realize that you have been marked for elimination. Once you know you are not suited to staying, you will quietly leave on your own.

But the upside is that if you do not CARE about anything, the company is also reluctant to spend severance pay to make you leave.