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 guidelinesWhen I left the company (in 2016), the food it produced was exceptionally good, if nothing has changed since then. The ingredients were genuine, and it did not use flavorings or fillers (such as maltodextrin).
What does this have to do with the pros?
The company provided some of its products as employee benefits for staff to prepare and consume themselves. It specialized in instant grain powders and had also “formerly” (the word “formerly” is used disparagingly here; see the cons) produced bread, cookies, and other baked goods. As employee benefits, these were quite good.
The company’s shortcomings can be divided into several areas: the owner’s attitude toward rules, the owner’s attitude toward employees, and the company’s use of manpower.
There were roughly three main issues: overly complicated rules, the owner’s strict management style, and manpower allocation.
1. Complicated rules
The owner was extremely particular about rules—so particular that they became cumbersome. He greatly admired Ko P’s SOP-based governance (I have a positive view of Ko P, but the comparison is intended disparagingly here).
From employee interviews, signing contracts, starting work, and production processes to leaving the company, everything was governed by complicated rules. If you violated even one of them, he would say that the rules had already been established and that, because you had violated them, he could punish you.
It is perfectly normal for a company to have rules and penalties. However, at this company, you would constantly hear the owner using these rules to admonish you, repeating them so persistently that... well, it felt like littering was illegal, but an old man followed behind you while you browsed a night market, reciting the penalties under his breath.
2. The owner’s attitude toward employees
Because it was a small company, the owner could keep track of every employee’s activities.
In terms of his attitude, he would tell employees that working hard with him would lead to success and that he was developing their abilities. In reality, as soon as you showed the slightest lack of enthusiasm... Actually, “lack of enthusiasm” is not quite right. If you did not appear proactive, the owner would look at you like a wage thief and “show you care.”
For example, he once saw a packaging employee (who packaged cookies) chatting at work about where to go for dinner that evening. As soon as he entered the office, he angrily berated the supervisor. He said that he had hired employees to work, not chat, so he was going to establish penalties: employees were not allowed to discuss anything unrelated to work while at the company, or they would be fired. He demanded that the supervisor enforce this strictly.
In short, when it came to rules and regulating employees, the owner was far too strict.
3. The company’s use of manpower
The company constantly had a staffing shortage. In my view, this was the result of the first two issues.
During my one year at the company, the entire baking department—one master baker and four apprentices—left. In the office, 60% of the staff—one purchasing manager, one accounting manager, and one sales manager, eight people in total—also left one after another.
Under the company’s rules, if the owner had not approved a decision, even after a manager made the decision independently, the owner would say, “If something goes wrong, you take full responsibility.” As a result, managers had to ask the owner about everything. As everyone knows, the owner was very busy: he had no time to give instructions over the phone or while traveling on business. From the day I joined the company until I left exactly one year later, almost none of the office staff ever left work on time. Incidentally, I only left on time during my first two weeks at the company...
The average time we left work (and by “left work,” I mean actually left the company premises) was generally half an hour to more than an hour late.
If you raised this with the owner, he would say that it showed you were incompetent, and that if he had done it himself, he could certainly have completed it successfully, and so on...
In addition, overtime was subject to a reporting system and required approval from a supervisor. However, because of the owner’s attitude... well, unless the company was rushing to fulfill an order, he generally considered ordinary work (note that the office and warehouse were mostly staffed at a level where one person did the work of two) to be part of your job and treated it as salaried responsibility, so you were not supposed to ask him for overtime pay.
4. Summary:
If you really want to train yourself to handle a heavy workload, or want to experience high-pressure life in the workplace, this company is a good fit for you.
If you care a lot about leaving work on time, I would advise you to consider it carefully.
At the time, my actual monthly pay was approximately NT$26,000–27,000, with a base salary of NT$23,000.
During my year at the company, I left work on time fewer than 30% of the time (let’s count leaving within five minutes late as on time). That is my impression, but in any case, it was definitely under 50%.
5. Several memorable experiences I personally had
The company’s hours were 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. My position was sales assistant and driver. Because the job involved miscellaneous tasks and kept me close to the owner, I experienced most of the company’s work and incidents firsthand.
Memorable incident 1: The latest I ever left work was 3 a.m. the following day! I had to drive the owner to Kaohsiung to inspect department-store sales channels. We were originally supposed to leave immediately after noon, but because the owner was “very busy,” we did not leave until after 4 p.m. (Our official workday ended at 5 p.m., by the way...)
Memorable incident 2: In the company’s baking department, the master baker developed an occupational illness from years of repetitive manual labor. At its worst, he could not lift either arm. He eventually decided to resign (I am not sure whether this was due to an old injury or his current condition). In the name of establishing SOPs, the owner required him to write down all the recipes and give them to him (from my perspective, you could call it making full use of resources in a favorable interpretation; less favorably... well). After the master baker left, the remaining apprentices also resigned one after another, and the baking department effectively became abandoned.
Memorable incident 3: The company accountant was given a hard time when resigning. The owner seemed to require her to hand over all the accounts from the past. However, much of the old data had become almost impossible to organize because the computer system had been replaced... In the end, we saw the accountant break down and yell at the owner before leaving the company immediately.
Memorable incident 4: My supervisor was a highly capable woman. Before she resigned, she asked me and another new employee to rate our impression of the company on a scale of 1 to 100. The other person and I gave the company scores between 60 and 80. In the end, she said she would not give the company a good score; I remember it was a failing number.
Memorable incident 5: Earlier I mentioned the incident in which the owner saw the packaging employee chatting. That afternoon, while driving the owner to Taipei to inspect department-store sales channels, I offered a mild suggestion: perhaps the matter did not need to be handled so harshly, and the supervisor could first admonish the employee not to affect work progress. The owner immediately said, “I’m the owner. I run this company. What does a wet-behind-the-ears kid like you know? If you insist on holding the opposite opinion, get out of the car right now and walk back to the company to write your resignation letter.”
(At the time, we were heading north toward Taipei, and the car was about to enter the interchange from Fengyuan.)
This incident made me feel that the owner was completely a person from the old production-line era. I could not possibly improve the company’s harsh management style, so I ultimately decided to resign.