None
Polite but lacking warmth, which makes people feel uncomfortable
The questions are extremely nitpicky
- Lots of group meals and afternoon teas—foodies will be very happy, though benefits are going to be cut back soon
- Lots of team-building activities, but most of the time everyone is too busy to leave their seats and participate
- You can freely choose to work remotely, although the company has recently started requiring employees to come into the office
- The office has beautiful decor and is conveniently located near an MRT station
- The company has a very good public image, which is a plus on your résumé
- The entry-level colleagues are all easy to get along with—yes, only the entry-level colleagues
- Constantly working overtime and busy to death. You can claim overtime, but when neither your manager nor senior colleagues do so, if you dare to claim it, then this is not a problem.
- Working hours are very fragmented. It is easy to be interrupted halfway through a task, and switching between different tasks and getting back into a focused state is genuinely exhausting.
- There are many pointless meetings—so many that there is no time to do actual work, leaving you with no choice but to work overtime to catch up.
- The turnover rate is the highest among all the teams I have worked in. The team had five people in total, and including me, three engineers left within a year. The reasons for leaving varied widely—those who understand, understand. Let the numbers speak for themselves.
- The team atmosphere is the one I have liked the least in my work experience. There is too much emotional labor, making it impossible to focus on and properly develop my skills in my actual work. This was also the main reason I resigned.
- The salary and bonuses are average. However, most people who enter the game industry are passionate souls who do not care about money. Thank you to this job for making me wake up from my dream and realize that I had not made any money.
- This is also the first time I have seen someone whose roaring ability is on par with Legislator Huang Kuo-chang.
The environment is beautiful, the benefits are good, and most of the junior colleagues are very nice.
The management has serious issues, staffing is severely inadequate, and many people treat working overtime as normal and do not dare report it. Unless the work processes are changed, the situation will likely be difficult to improve.
You will receive notification of the result very quickly.
1. They test how much you know about the company, but they themselves do not say much.
2. There are many situational questions, such as what you would do if this or that happened, but these hypothetical situations are completely unrelated to the duties of the position you applied for.
3. The test includes an oral Chinese-to-Japanese translation section, but English words are also mixed in. If you do not understand what is being said, they assume that you do not understand the technical terminology.
4. They pick apart loopholes in your wording and relentlessly press you on them.
For example: “You said you like games, so shouldn’t you be applying for a planning or programming position rather than a translation position?”
(I like games, so I want to join a game company and contribute to it with my own abilities.
Not everyone who likes games can write game plans or make games.)
Explains some things
(Entirely in Japanese)
1. As soon as the call was answered, they kept talking nonstop in a rapid-fire manner. The speaking speed was already fast enough, but they also liked to run their words together.
2. The questions were very strange and differed greatly from interview experiences shared online. I was asked things such as what I liked about the company and why I was interested in them. In short, the questions were about the company rather than what I could bring to it. It is not that being asked these kinds of questions is strange; what was strange was that the interview was like this from beginning to end. The job I applied for had nothing to do with game production, planning, or anything similar, and before the interview I was not given detailed information about the position—only a rough understanding of the job responsibilities (it felt like it mainly involved miscellaneous tasks). After I finished answering, the interviewer explained that the things I liked were unrelated to the type of job I had applied for. Of course they were—the position I applied for had nothing to do with games.
3. They did not explain the job responsibilities at all. From beginning to end, it felt like they were testing how much I knew about the company. Wasn't it only the information available online? They were probably testing whether I loved the company.
4. They asked for a very long time about what other companies I had applied to. Then they said, “That’s quite different from our game industry.” (Of course it is different—it’s a different company.)
5. They hung up the phone extremely forcefully. (Japanese companies usually teach proper telephone etiquette very early on, so encountering this was very bewildering.)
Advice: Personally, I think they wanted me to mention some of the company’s successes, and wanted applicants to be extremely ambitious and passionate about the game industry. The difficult part is that if the position is not in production, design, or planning, it is genuinely hard to know how to express that ambition. Keep this in mind before the interview. (If you are an applicant unrelated to the game industry—for an exaggerated example, an accounting position at a game company—you need to learn how to connect accounting with the game industry’s ambitions.)
Personal thoughts: It did not feel like what I had read in the available information. The website says that the atmosphere is wonderful, but perhaps you can only find out whether that is true after joining. You could tell that the interviewer was extremely proud of the company, and when answering my questions, they responded just like the website. Their attitude was extremely unfriendly. (Polite in form, but lacking genuine courtesy.) They seemed like the type who thinks, “Lots of people come to interview at our company, so don’t waste my time.” I also really want to say this: They had clearly reviewed my résumé and invited me to interview, and they knew I was a fresh graduate. If they did not need someone like that, could they please not waste other people’s time by interviewing them?
The company is quite nice, and the people I interviewed with were also pretty friendly.
I interviewed for this position over a year ago, and it is still open. Personally, I feel that they are not actually in need of staff.
At the time, I applied for a UI position, but the offer I received was for a design assistant instead. The salary was reduced significantly, and the working hours were changed as well.
I had actually made my desired compensation and working hours clear during the interview. After receiving an offer like this, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It made me feel disrespected and that my time had been wasted.
The technical supervisor asked questions in a very pleasant manner, and the overall interview atmosphere was relaxed and enjoyable.
No thoughts at the moment
Judging by the HR department, it seems to be a company that places considerable importance on appearances—but only that.
I originally interviewed for the Server Engineer position at this company, but the interview process was not very respectful toward applicants. Let me explain.
There were two female HR representatives at the interview: one named Kana Hashimoto, who was Japanese, and one named Ringo Wang, who was Taiwanese. The entire interview was conducted in English. When asking questions, Kana did not look at the applicant—that is, me—and kept looking at her computer. At first, I thought she was recording my answers, but she was typing while smirking at her laptop. We were discussing relatively serious topics at the time, so judging by common sense, I figured she was probably chatting with someone or something. However, chatting with someone online during an interview is extremely rude. I could not believe that a Japanese person would be so disrespectful during an interview. I had thought that only HR at Taiwanese companies would look down on people like that. Kana also lacked a basic understanding of the position and even asked whether I knew Graphic Design. Come on, that is in the field of visual design! Does a Server Engineer also need to know Graphic Design?
All right, then it was the Taiwanese representative Ringo Wang’s turn to ask me questions in Chinese—and she again asked whether I knew graphic design. Wasn’t that just the same question being asked once more in Chinese? Did she not understand that Kana beside her had already asked me whether I knew Graphic Design? If she worked at a Japanese company, shouldn’t she know English? Besides, I know that designers hate being called “art workers.” That is practically a land mine for designers!
As HR representatives, those two were truly extremely unprofessional.