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

A traditional industry with rigid systems, responsibility-based working hours, and salaries that depend on luck. You can learn about different fields, such as working as a cleaner or newspaper delivery person.

Some colleagues are crazy and some are sick; supervisors just talk and draw you grandiose promises to swallow. It can train your self-cultivation and emotional management.

Suitable for natural actors who are good at flattering supervisors—you’ll do very well here.

1. You have to sneak into universities to hand out flyers, write on blackboards, and hold lectures.

2. Following up on that, you have to provide refreshments for lectures and pay upfront yourself (NT$100 per student; 40 students means NT$4,000). You won’t be reimbursed until several weeks later.

2. Following up on that, holding lectures means playing cat and mouse with the campus security center, because the school won’t lend you a classroom. (In my first week on the job, I was yelled at by a school officer and swept out of the school.)

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

3. For the General Scholastic Ability Test, Comprehensive Assessment Program, and any civil-service examinations, you can be forced to work as an unpaid temporary worker handing out DMs.

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

5. They keep shouting about declining birth rates and asking everyone to weather hard times together, but apparently revenue hasn’t fallen.

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

7. The mentorship system for new hires can’t really be called good or bad, because it depends entirely on who your mentor is and whether they hold back information.

8. There are tons of meaningless meetings. If you don’t meet your targets, you have to go up and give a self-criticism report. I heard that in the past, it had to be written. (I’d rather write it than be publicly judged onstage.)

9. I completely don’t understand how supervisors make decisions. Today they say you’re going to the North Pole, so you go to the North Pole; tomorrow they say you’re going to the South Pole, so you go to the South Pole. You need excellent survival and adaptability skills.

10. During the interview, they said most colleagues were around the same age (almost no one over 30). Only after joining did I understand that this was because the retention rate was so low.

11. You have to bring your own toilet paper. Your colleagues can hear the sounds when you defecate, unless you never defecate at the company.

12. Your self-esteem is often belittled here. Although the scolding doesn’t usually go as far as personal attacks, you will be subjected to PUA-style manipulation, such as being told, “For someone 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 supervisors will compare and provoke people: “Look at so-and-so—they did ** ten-thousand in sales this month and even came in to work overtime on weekends to serve students,” and so on.

13. Supervisors will lead the group in isolating new hires they dislike. Group-work schedules are opaque, creating information gaps that make it impossible to coordinate work.

Eventually, you’ll realize that you’re being targeted and that you’re not suitable for staying, so you’ll quietly leave on your own.

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