竹工凡木設計研究室

A completely designed life

The company’s system is absolute bullshit. There are no real start or end times: the average workday runs from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. New employees who arrive punctually at 9 a.m. may even be locked outside for two hours. I have never once left work at 6:30 p.m. on time. They require you to live next door to the company in employee housing converted from their own property, with rent deducted from your salary each month based on Taipei rental rates. There is absolutely no distinction between working hours and off-hours, or weekdays and weekends. From the moment you open your eyes until you go to sleep, you work nonstop and have no personal time at all. You are either at the company or in the dormitory—and even when you are in the dormitory, the boss will come straight over to hold a meeting, since it is right next door.

They relentlessly brainwash you with slogans like: “Designers need passion. This is the design life everyone dreams of. Designers are supposed to devote their entire lives to design. We don’t call ourselves office workers; we are designers!” They say they will refine the designs to perfection, and that there is no day when the design is truly finished. Overtime pay, labor laws, and labor and health insurance are all treated as meaningless. Here, they say, we are one big family and everyone shares resources.

The boss’s mother is extremely partial: she only pays people she likes and pretends not to notice those she dislikes. She shares other employees’ private information and gossip with the employees she favors. It is completely her own empire; the outside world is irrelevant to her.

You can slack off at work; no one monitors you. You can secretly work on your own things, and working hours are flexible.

Regardless of what the boss or director says, he is a schoolteacher and really is just a teacher. He knows nothing about running a company. His design skills may be strong, but he copies from overseas—and copies thoroughly. They will tell you to find foreign websites with designs you like and simply copy them. Aside from being very good at teaching and design, the boss is not okay in areas such as practical experience and engineering. The engineering company they have worked with long term does not do meticulous work; completed projects are only suitable for viewing from a distance—up close, you will be disappointed. There are no senior designers in the company, whether in architecture or interior design; they use only recent university graduates. As a result, there are many problems on site, and even the contractors cannot understand the construction drawings. You have to create 3D models and explain them to the contractors. The company’s systems are also incomplete, with no clearly defined working hours. They will strongly pressure you to work overtime at night and come to the company on holidays. Bonuses depend entirely on the boss’s mother’s mood: if she likes you, she will give you one; even if you work overtime until you drop dead, it is useless if she does not like you. The managers are very inefficient and often make simple matters unnecessarily complicated. Internally, they like forming cliques. To put it nicely, the company has a strong reputation; in reality, it was built with money. If you are a recent graduate with no experience, I would recommend joining, but if you have work experience, you will be driven mad and die of frustration.