Sources and scope
This page collects workplace experiences, questions and discussions submitted by users. Dates shown are submission dates, not periods of employment. Individual reports do not describe the entire company.
Read the community guidelinesThe company is located in a residential area in the city center. The surroundings are quiet, transportation is convenient, and there are many good places to eat nearby.
There are no fire extinguishers or fire lanes, only flammable materials (paper) and printing machines.
The company is broadly divided into the Shipping Department, Customer Service Department, Graphic Design Department, and E-commerce Department. Except for the E-commerce Department, the division of labor is detailed, with everyone handling their own responsibilities.
Shipping Department:
Responsible for printing wedding invitations, so you smell ink all day. Before going home after work, you also need to make deliveries.
You can learn a little about printing, but it is not necessarily correct.
The supervisor seems like a nice person on the surface.
Customer Service Department:
Answering calls all day and handling orders, customer complaints, and tracking shipments.
The customers are very difficult. Apart from learning to cultivate your mind, improve yourself, and not get angry, you learn nothing else.
The supervisor is two-faced and constantly goes back on their word, making it difficult for others to work.
They also report every employee’s work situation to the boss every day, and tend to exaggerate.
They love taking credit for others’ achievements, while shifting blame and refusing to admit their own mistakes, leaving others to take the fall.
During work hours, they browse Facebook all the time. They do not answer the phone and will dump their own responsibilities on others.
When it comes to other people’s tasks, however, they draw a clear line and say they are not responsible for them.
Although they clearly dislike the boss, they also love sucking up to the boss.
Graphic Design Department:
Use information provided by customers in standard templates to design wedding invitations.
This department works overtime most often, is watched most closely by Customer Service and Shipping, and is also the department most likely to have money deducted from its pay.
Other than becoming more familiar with Illustrator and Photoshop shortcuts, you learn nothing. (You will not learn how to retouch wedding photos for customers.) Wedding invitations must be designed according to the boss’s preferences, with no opportunity for creative freedom. The boss will ask you to find images from stock-image websites and piece them together, or hand you someone else’s finished work and tell you to imitate it.
The supervisor is very quiet. When they do speak, their voice is so soft you cannot hear them. They take unfinished work home and are the type to work tirelessly without complaint.
E-commerce Department:
The most ambiguous department, and one that may be shut down at any time. Most of the work involves running the online store and designing wedding invitations; when busy, you need to support the Graphic Design Department.
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Sometimes you have to act as a laborer and move shipments, roughly once every two weeks.
All employees take turns carrying goods from the first floor to the fourth floor. The weight of most of the goods is unclear, but a petite woman definitely cannot carry them. You will end up sweating, straining your back, going home with sore muscles, and having arms so sore the next day that they feel unusable.
During peak season, you may have to work until the early hours of the morning.
**There is absolutely no overtime pay.**
If you make a mistake on an item or ship the wrong goods, the money will be deducted directly from your next month’s salary.
**Most deductions are at least NT$300 each time, and may even reach thousands of dollars. There is a set rate.**
(The boss and supervisors know perfectly well that no matter how careful you are, mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. They still deduct money from you, brainwashing you by saying it is to teach you a lesson. Even when the customer is at fault, the boss will not make the customer pay in order to protect the company’s image; instead, they deduct the employee’s pay.)
During the off-season, you have to worry about being laid off due to downsizing. The boss may dismiss people at any time, and will make you leave that same day without giving you any reason.
Benefits:
No employee meals.
No company trips.
There are employee dinners, but you arrange them yourself and pay for them yourself.
As for the year-end bonus, a senior supervisor who had worked there for five years received exactly NT$3,000.
Occasionally, the boss’s wife treats everyone to food, roughly once every two months. (Once, it was two waffles divided among eight people; once, it was a NT$50 bag of salty crispy chicken divided among eight people; once, it was one sesame ball per person.)
Work environment: Employees may only use the first-floor restroom and have to clean it themselves every week. The water dispenser often gets forgotten when it is time to order water. The first floor is packed with machines and goods, so you have to weave around just to walk. If you bump into goods and they fall to the floor and break, you have to pay for them. The stairs are old and poorly maintained, with nails sticking out, making it very easy to cut your feet.
On the surface, the boss will tell you that you can raise and discuss your opinions, encourage everyone to fight for their rights, and say that nothing can improve unless people speak up. But after you fight for your rights, the boss will fire you or do everything possible to make you quit.
During interviews, they make everything sound very good and say that everything complies with the Labor Standards Act. After you join, however, the boss will say, “Sometimes we don’t necessarily have to follow the Labor Standards Act.”
During interviews, they also say that your salary will be increased every three months, but it never is. If you ask the boss about a raise, you will be fired.
During interviews, they only mention that things are less busy during the off-season, but do not tell you that you may be placed on unpaid leave, downsized, or have your pay cut.
During interviews, they act as though they highly respect design, but in reality, the starting salary for every department is below NT$25,000.
(The boss also thinks that this salary below NT$25,000 already includes overtime pay.)
During interviews, they say overtime is uncommon, but in reality, during peak season you work overtime almost every day, starting with at least one hour. There have been times when people worked until 1 a.m. During the off-season, you still have to work overtime at least once a week.
The boss will also tell you that they are 99.999% opposed to overtime, but when there is a lot of work, the supervisor will require you to finish it before you can leave, with no overtime pay. (This has nothing to do with work ability; it is an amount of work that is absolutely impossible to finish in one day.)
The boss loves asking you to do something, then repeatedly changing it during the process. Finally, they tell you not to do it and to put it on hold, without explaining why. Much later, they ask you to find that task again, and when they discover you did not do it, they severely scold you, completely forgetting that they were the one who told you to put it on hold.
They also insult employees with profanity and pretend they are going to hit them, simply because a new employee does not yet understand what kind of wedding invitations the boss wants. If the work is wrong, the boss becomes unhappy.
When you repeatedly proofread work with customers because you do not want to make a mistake and have money deducted, or want to do something to reduce the error rate, the boss will instead accuse you of being too defensive and say that this mindset is bad and needs to change.
The boss likes moving people around and often makes employees move and change workstations, requiring them to do it after work hours.
There was once a snack cabinet, but employees had to buy the snacks out of their own pockets. The boss did not contribute any money and often helped themselves to the snacks, usually taking the most expensive ones.
The boss loves saying the company is not making money, but whenever there is a long weekend, they take their wife and children on a trip.
Once, they went abroad on a weekday without informing any supervisor. When the company needed to handle matters, there was no decision-maker available, and the entire company descended into chaos.
They often suddenly ask you to do something five minutes before the end of the workday, then stand beside you and watch until you finish before allowing you to leave. (This usually takes anywhere from half an hour to an hour, with no overtime pay.)
If you are injured because of work (for example, cutting your hand and bleeding heavily enough to require stitches at a hospital), they will deduct money from your salary. The boss will not ask how you are the next day or give you a red envelope; they will only coldly demand that you finish your work before leaving.
Conclusion:
If the coworkers who joined at the same time as you are nice, the suffering will be considerably less (assuming you do not mind working overtime without overtime pay or having money deducted for mistakes).
You must also be mentally prepared every day to be fired, have money deducted, or be yelled at by the boss.
If, after reading the above, you still want to join, beware of the supervisor in the Customer Service Department. They will act friendly toward you on the surface, but talk about you behind your back, regardless of who you are. They will pretend to casually mention things in front of the boss and take credit for them at the same time.
Remember to calculate your salary yourself every month, or the amount may be wrong.
(Sometimes when you are underpaid or money is deducted, the accountant will pretend not to know and say that the boss instructed them to do it. But when you ask the boss, the boss will also pretend not to know and say you should ask the accountant.)
Get used to the fact that turnover is very high. Sometimes you come to work the next day and the coworker beside you is simply no longer there.
This company is suitable for people who are willing to work tirelessly and can handle high pressure. If you think you are outstanding and can handle it, go ahead—but I believe that with qualifications as strong as yours, you can find a better company.
That’s all. Thank you for reading.
Layoffs and downsizing during the off-season, hiring and hiring and hiring during the peak season—using people to such an extreme, with such a high turnover rate, this kind of company......is it really smarter?