Taiwan's workplace is plagued by the distorted culture of "long hours" and "low wages." According to a Towers Watson market survey, the average starting salary for fresh Korean university graduates is $2,228 per month, the highest among 11 major countries and regions in Asia. The 2nd through 5th highest are Singapore at $2,143, Japan at $1,957, Hong Kong at $1,677, and Taiwan at $1,058. Converting to TWD, that's around NT$31,000, but in reality, many young people in Taiwan don't even earn that much.
Beyond low wages, many glamorous-looking jobs are essentially purchased with your life and sacrificed quality of living. Take my second job in "public relations," for example. The salary was around a master's degree starting salary, over NT$30,000. While work hours were flexible—starting at 9:30 AM—the end time was extremely unstable. Leaving at 8 PM was considered early; many colleagues would stay until 10 or 11 PM. Before major events, people would stay until 3 or 4 AM. I've even heard of colleagues going home at 6 AM to shower, then heading straight to the event venue to work.
Aside from PR, I know many friends in tech or pharmaceutical companies who, due to production line demands and responsibility-based systems, work over 12 hours daily and must be on-call even during holidays, making it difficult to ever truly relax. Then there are sales roles—real estate agent friends I know practically work until the early morning hours, then have to be back at the office at 7 or 8 AM to organize documents, spending the entire day running around. Work hours are extremely long. However, these industries typically have bonuses and higher salaries. The truly tragic ones are low-paying jobs with long hours.
Actually, many young people are incredibly talented, just with nowhere to apply their skills. Thankfully, we're now in an age of side hustles, which offers some leeway. However, most people graduate, leave the safety net of school, and enter the workplace brimming with ideals and passion, wanting to do their best. But often, due to low pay and excessive hours, they start questioning their life choices, thinking "Did I choose the wrong major?" Some endure two or three years with barely any salary increase, while making even small mistakes gets them thoroughly criticized by their bosses.
If people can't tolerate this, they might frequently switch jobs and companies, accumulating a messy, chaotic work history. One or two short stints might still be acceptable to interviewing companies, but over time, if you have five or six "short-lived" jobs, it triggers the other party to think "Maybe you just don't have stress resilience" or "Your frequent job-hopping is your problem, not the company's."
Of course, from a bystander's perspective, we might think the company's mindset is "normal," but I believe "stress resilience" means encountering tremendous pressure and responsibility, then finding ways to balance your mind and body, growing from the experience and gaining insight—that's what true resilience means. If long hours, low pay, or a boss deliberately making things difficult means you have to push yourself to the limit for two or three years just to get a three-thousand-dollar raise, what's the point?
Unfortunately, many companies and stubborn old-school employers don't understand this logic. Instead, they heap the "irrationality" created by the broader environment onto young people, freely condemning them as the "strawberry generation," while never reflecting: do the survivors who make it through such a system actually retain complete passion and ideals for their work? How do we enter the workplace brimming with passion, and how do we end up, because of such devastation, burying our ideals on the battlefield, then having to crawl away from our dreams?
