Pros
Some department managers are highly capable, with education and skills above what you’d typically expect at this company. Some foreign employees perform far better than expected and are more competent than many local staff. Performance bonuses or profit-sharing are offered.
Cons
The entire HR team resigned at one point, leaving the company without HR for a period. Staff from other departments were temporarily reassigned just to cover HR duties. The organizational structure has been under constant adjustment for a long time, with strategies repeatedly changing. The company keeps expanding and downsizing back and forth. Because of the owner’s indecisiveness, everyone is kept unnecessarily busy, the corporate image is damaged, and professionalism has declined — which makes client interactions awkward. As a family-run business, favoritism is serious. The eldest son is hot-tempered, overly ambitious, and treats people poorly. He leads internal bullying toward team supervisors and causes division within teams. The second son is young and unmotivated, drinks frequently, often takes credit for other departments’ sales, fires many capable employees arbitrarily, and lacks basic management ability — it feels like running a kindergarten. Hiring standards are inconsistent. Because it’s a long-established company, there are many unproductive senior employees who avoid responsibility and pass work around. Even many new hires are underqualified. Non-professionals with no relevant background were brought in and demanded that department heads follow their directions as if they were parachuted executives — and were eventually fired anyway. Due to heavy cuts in marketing staff, the structure shifted from four or five marketing units to seven, then down to one — like a game of chess. Many sales staff are placed on PIP with unrealistic KPIs created out of nowhere, then told to leave for not meeting them. Poor cross-department coordination leads to frequent raw material shortages. Overseas markets often lack sufficient inventory — even when there are buyers, there’s nothing to sell. Overall, the owner does not understand the value of marketing, so the business struggles to grow and remains stuck serving only small, second-tier clients. In a family business like this, avoiding departments controlled by the family is nearly impossible — both industrial control and sales will inevitably interact with them. The industrial control department manager is also quite rude. Although bonuses exist, they are only given after sufficient tenure and at management’s discretion; the amounts are limited, so expectations should be modest.