Pros
Very good working culture, little to no toxicity in working. Workload can get busy, but is very manageable. No forced OTs, almost everyone leaves by 6pm. No one will shame you for not working past working hours. WFH once a week, either Tuesday or Thursday. 9-6. Friendly and inclusive. There may be lots of Chinese here, but generally the people here are very inclusive and won't discriminate. (if you are Chinese, but don't speak Chinese very well, at most you will get joked at a bit, but it is very harmless.) Happy hour every Friday. Free food wahu, and most people generally like coming together to eat. Company is very cool and relaxed. Every year, there will be a company trip. The last trip we went for was to Vietnam, Da Nang. And it was a blast. You can opt for training and supervisors are very open to allow you to train in areas that improve your work.
Cons
Bonuses and employee reviews only come once a year. Increments and base salary are lower than the average market rate. Even upon asking for increments and appeals, it remains at company policy to only have the increment at the end of the year. Can't really say much regarding other departments, but marketing and design side team remain very small. 2-3 people, to juggle 4 other sister companies. As a motion designer trained in animation and video production hoping for mentorship in this area, more than half the time I'm not actually doing media related stuff but rather doing lots of other small little things (email saikang, pOwerpoiNt, buy company gifts for bosses, vendor outreach, dEliver chAmpaGne, general saikang...etc). And maybe once in a while I get to do what I love, which is animation and video production for linkedin content. My supervisor is very optimistic in building a whole marketing team even if it is only 3 people now. However, it has been almost 12 years and the team has only added 1 person so far. Same applies for the design team where it has been 5 years but their team remains at 2 people on site tanking work from up to 13 supervising clients. Whilst the work is very doable and relaxed under the marketing side (even if there is saikang), growth and career progression can be slow, and it is very dependent on self-training. Unfortunately in animation, while self training in animation is possible, there is little application in the kinds of works you do here in Equalbase. And with the little admin saikangs here and there, training is interrupted and it is tough to complete it unless we have actual projects that require that skill. At most I can say, video editing is somewhat useful here? But if you want to actually design something and learn actual media production, it will be rather challenging as there is little guidance in those areas and design wise, you are tied down to the marketing brand guidelines which are somewhat limiting. Most video projects we do here are "first time" experiences so there are few references and SOPs at the time being. Nonetheless, supervisors here are very open to exploring new ways to generate engaging content and I certainly appreciate it. Animation is not the main thing for this company, so I can understand why I would need to do other things that are tied to marketing like admin. And its probably also the reason why the team has remained small for so long.