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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 guidelinesLeaving work on time every day; requests for personal leave will not be blocked (note that this refers specifically to personal leave, because personal leave is unpaid. There is no guarantee for other types of paid leave...).
They say you’re an administrative staff member, but the job is essentially that of a cleaning lady plus a gofer.
1. If there are fallen leaves outside the perimeter wall, it’s your responsibility.
2. If the trash hasn’t been taken out, it’s your responsibility.
3. If the coffee machine is dirty, they’ll come to you.
4. If the potted plants haven’t been watered, they’ll come to you.
5. Every so often, they’ll ask you to clean the fish tank (washing the fish tank takes about half a day).
6. Every task that HR and accounting don’t want to do will end up on your plate. Helping reconcile accounts and make photocopies can involve roughly as much material as a dictionary. Even if you find a problem while reconciling the accounts and tell them about it, if they forget to correct it, they’ll still say it was because you failed to remind them.
7. To solidify their standing with the supervisor, colleagues in the same department will constantly monitor you to see whether you’re working seriously. When you go out to mail something and come back, they’ll even complain to the supervisor about how long it took you to mail it that day (implying that you went off to slack off).
8. Before making offerings, research the customs carefully so you don’t do them incorrectly. Burn joss paper in the correct order, and remember to look up the right information online about how many offerings to prepare. No one will ever tell you what to do, but if you do it wrong, it’s still your fault. Even if you did nothing wrong, if the supervisor thinks you did, they’ll lecture you all day. The entire office will gang up on you, and they may even imply that your family has no ancestors to honor.
9. If you don’t know where anything in the office is kept, make sure to “remember to ask colleagues from other departments” (because it’s very important, remember to repeat this silently three times). It’s best to ask secretly, too; if colleagues in your own department find out, they’ll seize the opportunity to lecture you all day.
10. Leave is taken in half-day units; you can’t take just one hour. The supervisor frequently leaves work early, but even if you arrive just one minute late, they’ll insist that you make up the time. Otherwise, just resign yourself to taking half a day of leave.
It is probably fair to say that transportation is convenient and the amenities in the surrounding area are quite good.
Last year (2017), I interviewed for an accounting position. The interviewer was a woman who looked to be around fifty or sixty years old. She was fairly polite, and her description of the company's prospects also sounded quite good, but she was somewhat evasive about some of the questions I asked at the time. In the end, when we discussed the salary, the interviewer kept trying to negotiate it down to an assistant-level salary, even though the accountant she wanted was clearly someone who could get up to speed immediately. In addition, there was no overtime pay for overtime worked on weekdays; at most, overtime worked on holidays could be exchanged for compensatory leave.
Later, someone I know went to a post-production company that had worked with Hancao. I learned that they were quite aggressive about negotiating down prices with vendors, and that their accounting staff also seemed to be consistently unstable, so I guess the workload internally was probably quite intense (although I've heard that's just how the film and television industry is).