The work environment is spacious. There are endless snacks.
The benefits are not very good. You have to take a logic test... It is a waste of time. The interviewers were two department managers: one was friendly, and the other had no expression. Overall, it was okay.
1. A startup with a flat organizational structure, making upward communication convenient (though whether management will acknowledge you is another matter).
2. Convenient transportation; located in the Shin Kong Life Tower at Taipei Main Station. The office environment and views are quite good.
1. Laying off employees or asking them to accept pay cuts before the Lunar New Year.
2. Senior managers are half-hearted about their goals and cannot fully trust or respect professional expertise.
3. The entire company talks about pursuing optimization to the utmost, yet not everyone follows this principle—saying one thing and doing another.
The pre-employment training provides boxed lunches.
This company goes by several names:
Digital Advertising, Jiuda Marketing, Jiuda Information, and Innovative New Retail.
There are relevant reviews here:
https://www.qollie.com/companies/58dbb873f39d14a565d11b76
https://www.qollie.com/companies/58dbb862f39d14a565d00b8b
The scenery is pretty good.
I know Chairman Cheng and Chairman Hsu are watching. I sincerely urge you to adopt a professional manager system rather than govern through personal confidants. The mid-level managers are clearly very capable, so why drive talented people away? Foxconn, a leading contract manufacturer, still places importance on selecting, employing, developing, and retaining talent, and brings in truly professional HR and administrative managers to establish sound systems, rather than using all sorts of underhanded tactics to restrict employees’ rights and openly violate the Labor Standards Act. What I’m saying should make it quite clear to you who the real cancer is, right? Using threats to force employees to comply or else fine them—if you regard employees as assets, you shouldn’t haggle over every little thing with those assets.
The smog is a bit heavy.
I had breakfast with the group of authors today and thought the lady on the 31st floor was very nice. Tinny also has a very sweet smile. Thinking about going upstairs is like a warm current in the middle of winter. Boo-hoo, this place is a bit like being in the military....
1. The office environment is fairly new.
2. Located in the Shin Kong Building.
3. After completing one year, you get three additional days of annual leave, but they are basically all deducted anyway.
4. Perfect-attendance bonus of $2,000.
1. To accommodate the government's adjustment of consecutive holidays, Saturday makeup workdays are scheduled. However, because the company's clients do not work on Saturdays, the company tells employees to use their own annual leave. Those without annual leave must use personal leave instead, which is essentially a forced deduction from their pay. Whether this violates the Labor Standards Act or skirts the edge of legality is open to debate.
2. The company does not pay overtime, and applications are made difficult. However, during the probationary period, you are required to start work one hour early, resulting in a nine-hour workday.
3. The training has no professionalism whatsoever; it is merely boring, scripted instruction. I previously experienced training at a large corporation, where the courses covered creative marketing and lean management. The content differs vastly from what this company repeatedly promotes under the name of “training.”
If you want to be exploited for low pay, welcome here. Although I have already left, I did learn a few things, and the senior employees are very good at teaching—although I heard there are only two senior employees left.
The management consists entirely of the boss’s confidants. If they take a dislike to you, or if employees seem to be having too much fun chatting and they can’t stand seeing you do well, they will find a bunch of reasons to lay you off.
Some time ago, many long-term employees were tricked into signing contracts prohibiting them from resigning within two years. Resigning required them to pay compensation of over NT$100,000, and I heard that many senior employees ended up losing money. When some senior employees wanted to resign, HR even pressured them about why they had not yet transferred the compensation payment. They were still in the handover process, yet were already being asked to pay. If your family has too much money, come here and pay it.
The senior managers have almost no understanding of online marketing, yet they tell employees that the company aims to become Taiwan’s online advertising leader. It looks as though the two bosses only know how to make empty promises. You can look up the bosses’ names and find a whole host of “great achievements.”
Some managers also secretly copy other people’s online articles and pass them off as their own, teach a bunch of misleading sales scripts to deceive clients, and tell their subordinates to come here and whitewash the situation. A company with so many negative reviews—my advice is that you really should not send in your résumé carelessly.
According to a former employee, a new hire merely chatted with a female new hire who started at the same time. After HR saw this, they said he was unsuitable for the position and forced him to resign. Yet shortly afterward, they suddenly held a meeting with the new hires about preventing sexual harassment and similar topics, warning the new hires not to mess around.
If you do not sign the two-year contract, you will definitely be treated as a rank-and-file employee. You will not receive training, benefits, or assignments, and you can forget about being promoted to a manager or team leader. Please consider this carefully.
None
They won't even give you a glass of water during the interview!
The supervisor didn't show up either; a colleague who was probably from HR came to introduce the job.
They first ask what salary you expect, then tell you that the starting salary is the same whether or not you have work experience. Later, you'll have opportunities to advance based on your abilities, but you don't even know what the supervisor looks like—how are you supposed to know whether they're willing to promote you?
Resources are generally open, and most colleagues are very willing to answer your questions. People are also very nice.
They really like to say that they offer conditions better than those required by the Labor Standards Act. If there is a consecutive holiday for which you would normally need to make up a workday, you do not need to make it up, but the company will deduct a day of annual leave from you on that day. New employees without annual leave have it advanced, so basically you cannot make use of your annual leave.
If you want to take annual leave, you must apply before the 20th of the previous month. Temporary applications after the 20th incur a deduction of NT$250 from your perfect-attendance bonus each time.
It still has to be said that you really can learn things here, but it can be mentally exhausting. The various tests from upper management are a source of pressure—from individual meetings to sign three-year contracts, to the company offering free participation in the company banquet after completing the entire year of 2017. If you did not participate, they would call you in for a meeting and ask, “Won’t you be working until the end of the year?”
Applying for overtime pay is extremely difficult; basically, it is a system where you are responsible for getting the work done regardless of hours.
Employees are frequently called in for meetings and have their seats rearranged, supposedly for operational convenience. However, colleagues handling the same business and on the same team are often seated far apart. You can even have your seat changed for talking and having too much fun with colleagues.
Oh, right—discussing legal issues related to contracts with colleagues can get you fired. No matter how proactive or hardworking you usually are, it can all vanish in an instant.
Although resources are openly available, actual opportunities and resource allocation are very limited. Of course, the official line remains that the company will select the people it considers suitable.
When I first joined the company, the HR director loved saying that this was not a one-person dictatorship, that the company was a big family without factions, and that employees were welcome to raise and discuss problems at any time so they could be resolved promptly. In reality, it is a narrow-minded environment that cannot tolerate anyone expressing opinions opposed to management. There are many examples of people being transferred, marginalized, or fired. Think carefully before submitting your résumé.
Welcoming those who are obedient and tough enough to endure
As long as you are obedient and tough enough to endure, you can take control of the future
If I had to say what the advantages of this job are, its Google Ads work places a strong emphasis on planning the initial structure, which is a good thing to learn.
If you love military life and enjoy writing Juguang diaries, you are welcome to join this company.
But if you like Juguang diaries, why not enlist? The pay for military service is far higher than this job's.
A very amusing company—a hybrid of a cram school and Military Online. One of the bosses runs a cram school, and the other is a career military officer who has left the service.
As far as I know, the management was completely replaced about a year and a half ago, which is when things became the way they are now.
There is three days of pre-employment training before you start, for which you receive NT$500 in travel expenses. These three days are like attending make-up classes at a cram school: you are made to watch videos nonstop.
On the first day, there is a video called “The Three-Part Formula for Office-Worker Success,” which takes about six hours to watch. The basic message is that you should throw yourself fanatically into your work, obey every instruction from your superiors, and proactively take responsibility. The speaker says things like he sleeps only four hours a day, reads reports until 2 a.m., and gets up at 6 a.m., but is very happy because he is a successful manager. Judging from his appearance, though, the presenter’s liver must already be completely ruined.
Every day you have to write notes and do assignments, which are submitted for inspection. On each of these three days, you have to read those spiritual-growth articles written by ghostwriters for self-satisfied old businessmen, then write reflections on your spiritual growth. Basically, it is a Juguang diary.
There are also all kinds of assignments, in enormous quantities—so much that you start wondering whether you are simply incompetent. For example, there is an assignment to write a keyword proposal with an absurdly large workload. The standard is that the number of ad groups should equal the daily budget divided by 50, with 20–25 keywords per group.
But once you actually go in and do keyword advertising, you realize it is completely impossible to write that many. For an ad with a daily budget of 3,000, am I supposed to create 60 ad groups, totaling 1,200 keywords? If you ask anyone at the company about this, they will be left speechless, because they know perfectly well that it is nonsense.
Later, I heard HR casually say, as though it were self-evident, “Everyone who passes the pre-employment training stays up until three or four in the morning during those three days.” That was when I realized the whole point was to put you through the wringer and see whether you were submissive enough.
If you make it through the pre-employment training, congratulations—you still have to spend anywhere from two to four weeks writing a huge number of proposals. At the same time, you will continue watching instructional videos every day, and every day you will be given spiritual-growth articles and told to write reflections about positive energy.
After you start working, you must write a daily work report every day, but you are not allowed to write it during work hours. Besides listing your regular daily tasks and plans for the next day, you also have to write meeting minutes, what you did best that day, how you can improve yourself each day, and “what you learned today.” Having to write what you learned today after a busy day of repetitive work is extremely painful. After finishing all that, you still have to write a “personal growth reflection” and a “communication and questions section.”
And you cannot write too little in the above sections. If you do, your supervisor will ask why you have no questions, whether you have not been studying seriously, and how they are supposed to help you. If you have no reflections, does that mean you have not put your heart into the work?
Even if you asked someone or looked up information during the day and found the answer to a problem, you are considered unserious if you did not write it in the questions section for your supervisor to see!
The “meeting minutes” in the daily work report are defined by the company’s management as including any conversation you have with any supervisor or senior colleague. The company’s managers say they will “compile everyone’s meeting minutes and send the complete version to everyone,” but of course that has never happened.
In addition, this company forces employees to hold book clubs. Once again, the books are spiritual-growth books ghostwritten for old entrepreneurs, telling you to work yourself to death and treat work as the meaning of life. They take place every two weeks, half an hour before work (unpaid, but your pay will be docked if you do not attend), and you also have to write a reading reflection. If you write too little, you will be criticized as well. The boss says that it is fine and that you can simply write a note saying you will not participate, but they will relentlessly mock you during the book club. Needless to say, you should not expect to be entrusted with important work either.
Recently, this has been suspended because the company moved. Otherwise, there was also an employee meeting every week, called an “optimization meeting.” Unfortunately, if the head of the optimization department is absent—she is basically the only person with digital-marketing expertise worth learning from—it becomes a rambling session by the two bosses, who can go on for an hour.
The company’s management staff mostly came from cram schools and are generally clueless about digital marketing. The boss who used to be a career military officer only tells you that you have to fight hard and you will succeed, and that you cannot imagine how hard his childhood was.
The cram-school-owner boss, meanwhile, is always saying that Taiwan is truly miserable and doomed, that young people in Taiwan only care about small comforts, and that Chinese young people have so much more “wolfishness,” with their astonishing digital and technology entrepreneurship. But while he was spouting all this, China’s internet bubble and the mass deaths of mobile services had already begun. Anyone who follows technology news would find it unbelievably stupid—how far behind is he? Is he still using pigeon packets?
Also, our main business is clearly Google Ads keyword advertising that cannot enter the Chinese market, yet he spends all day going to China to discuss partnerships. I have no idea what the hell he is trying to discuss.
The company is located in the Shin Kong Life Tower at Taipei Main Station, making it convenient to get there.
The office has just moved in, and the desks, chairs, and overall environment feel very new. (When you first walk in, there is still a newly renovated smell.)
I applied for the position of Online Marketing Planner, and the interview experience was probably not particularly good. First, they emailed me asking me to complete a very detailed résumé form. I could reluctantly accept it as information they wanted filled out in advance to save time, but the form asked for so much detail that I felt uncomfortable. (For example: previous work experience, years of experience, salary, etc.) Perhaps I was just being too sensitive about this part.
Before arriving, I was not informed in advance that there would be a written test. On the day of the interview, I was asked to complete:
2 sheets of company interview questions (The general content asked about my observations of the company, how long I expected to work there, and other questions that should have been discussed during the interview.)
1 sheet of logic test questions
1 sheet of keyword copywriting test questions
1 sheet of terminology explanations and estimated media-effectiveness calculations
Halfway through, I was interrupted and asked to listen to HR explain some of the company’s policies:
1. Before starting employment, there are three days of pre-employment training. This does not count as formal employment; meals and NT$500 per day for transportation expenses are provided.
2. After the three days, formal employment begins, along with a three-month probationary period. The salary is NT$25,000 per month. (HR mentioned that those with relevant experience would receive a salary negotiated with the supervisor.)
3. Seniority and perfect-attendance records begin accumulating during the three-month probationary period. Successfully meeting the requirements within three months qualifies the employee for a raise. (The requirement is a relevant keyword certification.)
They also gave a general explanation of the company’s philosophy and related points to note. After being hired, employees would generally be required to rotate through every department and learn all the basic tasks.
I then continued writing the test. Once again, halfway through, I was asked to go to another meeting room for an individual interview.
The résumé used during the interview was the form the company had sent beforehand and required me to complete.
As soon as we met, the interviewer said that we had the same zodiac sign, so they understood very well what people like me were thinking. They came across as extremely self-centered.
They then asked some general personality-related questions (including explanations of the strengths and weaknesses listed on my résumé), as well as how I would handle situations encountered at work and how I would solve problems in response to customer needs. The first interview ended…
Second interview
I briefly introduced my previous work situation and responsibilities. They asked what value I could bring by joining the company and requested my salary range from my previous job. After directly asking about the conditions during the first three months of probation, I was told that my relevant abilities did not match the position I had applied for, and that the compensation I expected was at a managerial level within the company. In addition, because I could not provide value to the company immediately upon joining, the compensation I had written as my expected salary was not applicable.
I therefore ended the interview immediately.
Final result: I received a thank-you letter.
School + militarized management... hmm... those who agree will stay; those who don't should leave quickly.
However, this management style is indeed rare in the digital media industry.