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

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

Colleagues are either crazy or sick, while supervisors do nothing but talk and draw you pies to eat. It can train your self-cultivation and emotional management.

Suitable for natural-born actors who want to flatter supervisors; you’ll do very well here.

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

2. Related to the above, you have to pay for the catering for seminars upfront yourself (NT$100 per student; 40 students means NT$4,000), and you won’t be reimbursed until several weeks later.

2. Related to the above, you have to play cat and mouse with the campus security center when holding seminars, because the school won’t lend you a classroom (during my first week on the job, I was yelled at by a school instructor and swept out of the school).

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

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

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

5. They keep shouting about declining birth rates and asking everyone to endure the difficulties together, but supposedly revenue hasn’t declined.

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

7. The newcomer mentor-apprentice system can’t be called good or bad, because it depends entirely on who your mentor is and whether they hold anything back.

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

9. I have absolutely no idea how the supervisors make decisions. If they say today that we’re going to the North Pole, we go to the North Pole; if they say tomorrow that we’re going to the South Pole, we 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, and your coworkers can hear the sounds when you poop—unless you never poop at the company.

12. Your self-esteem is often put down here. Although the scolding doesn’t usually rise to the level of personal attacks, you will be subjected to PUA-style manipulation: “For someone with your abilities, you’re already doing pretty well here. You definitely wouldn’t earn this much at another job, and it would be harder.” Or supervisors will compare and pressure you: “Look at so-and-so—they did NT$** ten-thousand in sales this month and even came in to work overtime on holidays to serve students,” and so on.

13. Supervisors will lead the isolation of newcomers they dislike. Group-work schedules are not transparent, creating information gaps that make it impossible to coordinate work.

Eventually, you’ll realize that you’ve been singled out and that you’re not suited to staying, so you’ll quietly leave on your own.

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