Workplace reviews and discussion: 民翔環境生態研究有限公司

1. When the boss is in a good mood, he treats the entire company to pizza.

2. As long as there is a legitimate reason, the boss generally does not restrict where you drive the company vehicle.

3. There were company trips, but there weren't any when I had just joined. It wasn't until my third year that one was organized. (I heard that after I left, they went to Okinawa.)

4. If any employee makes a mistake, the boss's first response is to teach and help them, rather than immediately dismissing them.

Although I left six years ago, this company had such a significant impact on my subsequent job search that I figured I would still write a memoir of my experience:

1. When you first join, most colleagues are not very good at teaching you. You have to gradually ask questions yourself, and even when some things are explained, there may still be parts you do not understand and have to figure out on your own. You do not necessarily need to have worked another job before, but it is best to have basic self-learning ability before joining.

2. If you successfully pass the probationary period, the boss will start assigning you a lot of projects. Each full-time employee has to shoulder at least four or five projects, and the boss never informs you in advance what kind of project will be assigned. Often, when you arrive at work in the morning, you will see an extra folder on your desk—that means the boss is assigning you a new project.

3. The boss requires everyone to submit a work log every week, then evaluates everyone’s workload and whether anyone is slacking off based on those logs.

4. However, sometimes the boss does not even know what work he assigned to everyone and will mistakenly think employees are slacking off. The incident I remember most clearly happened when, at a monthly meeting, the boss required everyone to schedule a duty person each week to clean the office. One time, I was the duty person and was cleaning the lobby when the boss happened to walk by. He asked me in a very stern tone what I was doing. I said I was the duty person, and only then did he leave begrudgingly. It feels really awful to be misunderstood as slacking off when you are clearly doing work that is part of your responsibilities.

5. The boss often says that performance reviews and salaries will be assessed based on work performance, but in reality, how performance and salaries are determined is entirely up to the boss. If the boss does not value you, no matter how hard you work, he still will not increase your salary.

6. By the time I left, my salary had never exceeded 30K. It only slightly exceeded that amount on the very occasional occasions when I worked more than ten hours of overtime. I later learned that, at the time, the normal market rate for university graduates in the industry was at least 31–33K. In other words, I was exploited from beginning to end. But I was too naive at the time and always believed that doing work I was interested in was more important than salary. I strongly advise young people entering the workforce with career dreams not to make the same mistake I did.

7. Around my third year after joining, the boss hired a newcomer. Strangely, after only six months on the job, this newcomer was immediately promoted to assistant manager. (In my three years there, I had never seen anyone become an assistant manager in six months.) The newcomer was also frequently awarded performance bonuses, and was assigned work outside of surveys, such as giving presentations. Even though my workload was heavier than his, his salary was higher than mine. The relationship between this newcomer and the boss is therefore easy for everyone to imagine.

8. Oh, right—the performance bonus mentioned above came with the condition that if your report was innovative enough, it would be considered well written, and the boss would announce and award you a bonus at the next monthly meeting. However, when I actually introduced innovations into the content of my reports, the boss instead said, “This does not conform to our company’s report format. The report format has to be consistent, so that outsiders will know that this is a report produced by our company.” Huh? If innovation conflicts with the company’s report format, then how did this newcomer receive the performance bonus?

9. Most importantly, I am not sure whether this is common at most companies, but the senior employees at this company were all very stubborn by nature. If you did not do something well, they often would not try to understand why you had done it poorly, nor would they really try to communicate with you. Instead, they chose to bully you—either constantly berating you during business trips or mocking and ignoring you when discussing work at the office. And even if you had a valid point, the boss would not take your side. If you tried to stand up to those senior employees, you would be dismissed, just as I was.

10. Taken together, based on everything above, virtually every junior colleague I saw during my time there left within two years. Some people also left without properly handing over their work, leaving me to clean up their messes.

11. Finally, one relatively unimportant additional point: the boss almost never hired female surveyors, hiring women only for in-office positions. (Perhaps he was worried that interactions between men and women would affect work efficiency? But I did hear that other environmental consulting companies had male and female employees dating each other.) Of the three female employees I saw the boss hire during my time there, two had very serious “princess syndrome.” One of them had it so severely that she abandoned the work halfway through a survey and took a car home by herself. (She quit after three months.) The other talked constantly about how her father was in Japan and how she wanted to work there. After taking six months of unpaid leave, she returned to the company for one month and then really did quit to work in Japan.

12. One last relatively unimportant point: once, I went alone to northern Taiwan to conduct tree measurements continuously for a week. Since my hometown happened to be near the project area, I could stay at home overnight instead of staying elsewhere, saving the company a large amount of accommodation expenses. I originally expected the boss to find some way to pass on some of the accommodation costs I had saved to me, but I received nothing. Why did I bother saving the company that money in the first place?