威翰文創股份有限公司

Taking leave is easy (although an employer is not allowed to refuse a one-day annual leave request in the first place), and there is no need to work overtime (because there is no overtime pay).

You have to be prepared to take on multiple roles as soon as you join. The position you applied for is basically not a useful reference. Small companies naturally have this kind of drawback, but this company takes it to an extreme: when they want employees to take on duties outside their job description, they call you in and tell you that you are easily replaceable, that the company is helping you plan your career and giving you room to develop, and then naturally dump the extra work on you without caring that your original duties are already far more than you can finish. You can go from procurement to sales and still be reminded not to think of yourself as sales staff. The department bonus they keep talking about has less spiritual pressure than a bow and arrow—basically zero. When you bring up a raise, you get the astonishing statement, “You can only learn this much at a small company.” Then you should do it yourself—why not lay me off, boss? The boss, the boss’s wife, and the senior office manager all have utterly bizarre logic. They expect you to use an entry-level salary to come up with every possible solution for the company, but they cannot clearly explain what needs to be done and expect you to guess. This company is the best proof of the Peter principle. Meetings are frequent, and the records can basically be completed by copying the planned items into the completed section, but the boss will still nitpick the wording because he cannot understand it. Boss, you said that writing “design” would mean there would be an attachment, but that belongs in the planned-items field, so of course there is nothing there. The attachments are all in the completed-report field—what??? A company that makes you question your common sense every day and leaves you with nothing but a giant question mark. You are not only expected to help with shipping and calculating payments, but also with packing. Because the cooperation with employees is apparently too good, the boss’s wife even preemptively took on a large volume of outsourced packaging and processing work—orders worth over one or two thousand each—and expected employees to make them by hand, while of course continuing their original duties in parallel. They treat physical labor like an idle clicker game where they are god-tier players. In the end, naturally, there was no raise or bonus either.

As my first full-time job in life, this was absolutely a shipwreck.

Is taking time off easy?

A company that shows very little respect for people. If the boss dislikes you, they can dismiss you for any reason. Two weeks before the annual bonus was due to be paid, they told me to leave—and they did not even give me time to collect my belongings or say goodbye to my colleagues; they only wanted to get rid of me as quickly as possible.

As for the systems, they are a complete mess, and the organizational structure is utterly confusing.

There are no principles at work; everything is decided by the CEO and the vice president!

The salary is even worse. For someone with three years of work experience, they offer only a little over 20,000, then promise that your salary will definitely be increased after three months. They paint all sorts of blueprints that are impossible to realize. They say it is an administrative position, but once you join, they make you work as a sales assistant. They say you will be doing graphic design, but then expect you to take on marketing as well. Because some colleagues are too capable, they are assigned many tasks that are clearly outside their responsibilities. Whenever something goes wrong, the people below are always blamed. They expect you to be highly capable but are unwilling to offer corresponding pay, so the extremely high turnover is inevitable.

The sales bonuses are practically nonexistent. In a good month, you might get about 10 dollars, enough to buy a bottle of Macu Red Tea and share it with a colleague.

During the company’s shipping periods, everyone—regardless of position—is sent to work as a packer. Even if you work until you are exhausted, the boss will only tell you to get a 10-dollar ice pop from the freezer, as if that makes up for it. There is absolutely no additional pay.

You may want to help promote the business, but the company’s products are so poor in quality that you feel guilty every day. Every time you sell a product, you feel as though you have taken another step toward hell.

You also have to deal with people who have serious emotional-regulation issues. You may be berated or given dirty looks for no reason, and the work atmosphere is terrible. You are not allowed to chat with colleagues from other departments because management is afraid that if colleagues become too close, one person’s resignation will trigger a domino effect. They are completely out of their minds.

The company management is fairly relaxed?

The salary is very low. A colleague who had worked for three years only received a NT$50 raise, while the company was making money. Overall, employees received a NT$5 raise—you read that right. The boss’s wife is a manager who meddles in everything but manages nothing well, acting as a hindrance. Although the company is in education, she has very limited educational understanding and keeps applying the same theory to every scientific principle. She wants to save money on everything, even picking up discarded items, washing them, and reselling them as teaching aids and materials to customers. She is a supervisor who shows very little respect for people. The boss also only values sales; whenever he is not in Taiwan, he lets his wife do whatever she wants, often leading to major problems.