SharpDots Reviews

Company has three names Sharpdots/Spacefold/Sari Art The original name of this print shop is Sari Art (owned by Peter and Teresa Tan) Their son, John Tan CEO of Sharpdots, opened a second print shop inside the same company and they were both (from my understanding) under Spacefold. My checks, yes checks (they do not offer direct deposit) were under the Spacefold name, Employee work technically for both Sari Art and Sharpdots. At first, it did seem like an ordinary company, the longer I worked there the more I started noticing. They would give extra days off here and there, exciting right? Nope, it was to drain your paid time off (PTO), you did not get sick or vacation you received what is referred to as PTO and it wasn't very much. When a fellow coworker told Peter she did not want to use her PTO of a day here and a day there, he had asked her why not. She had explained that she would like to take a small vacation, his response was only rich people take vacations. When Peter made mistakes, he would then blame the Employees for his mistakes. Peter would yell, verbally putting down employees, making a rude comment to an employee about his son's death. John was also verbally putting down employees, micromanaging, and passing off his work to employees that were already overworked while he was in the office. If john wasn't in the office your 1-2-1 meeting (private meeting between you and John) was over the phone. He made 1-2-1's weekly and mandatory, in those meetings you would have to come up with a weekly commitment idea (I'll get to that in a second) in my meeting he would put me down, yell at me and try to make me feel inferior. The weekly commitments, John would make all the employees gather into a room and hold a meeting, we would have to tell him one way that week that we would make the company better. These commitments were to outside of your job duties but had to tie into your position. In the meeting, if he decided that he did not like your weekly commitment he would as you to stay after. In this meeting you had to tell what was your last weeks' commitment, did you complete it, and your new commitment for this week. Now all the employees were different hats and the workload was massive, it was hard to get all your work done and the commitment every week. He would get angry if you did not have a commitment or if you did not complete your commitment. Now for When John was out of the office (which was quite a bit) there was a little bit of relief. If you had a meeting scheduled with John and he wasn't in the office, you would have to have a meeting over the phone. When John wasn’t in the office either he would call you or you had to call him. Some employees he would call numerous times. His first words out of his mouth to me was always what are you doing and once I answered her would always question me. He had this way of still having complete control even when he wasn’t in the office. John and Peter fought constantly, you could hear them screaming at each other, I always got a little nervous. The other employees reassured me when they yell at each other, by the end of it they were too tired to yell at the employees. One of the hardest parts of the job was to avoid the calls from the companies that they would owe money to. While I worked there, if anyone asked for Peter or John, I had to find out as much information and say let me see if he's in. I would then look for Peter (most of the time he was sleeping in his office) and tell him everything about the person that was looking for them. Peter would then tell me, ok I'll talk to them or tell them he was not there. I remember lawyers calling the office trying to find Peter to try and collect money that was owed to someone. Benefits are only healthcare (don’t let John fool you into thinking there is more) and your 90 day review is at 5-6 months.

The work environment at Sharpdots is far and away the worst I've experienced anywhere. You will deal with all kinds of unnecessary stress and chaos if you work there, but those aren’t the worst aspects of the job. The worst aspects of the job all stem from the CEO and President, John. He routinely mocks, belittles, and ridicules his employees. Without any thought of professionalism, or really even just being a decent boss or person, he will laugh with open condescension and derision if he thinks you've said something that doesn't make perfect sense. He absolutely jumps at any opportunity to put people down. In almost any situation, trivial or not, he INSISTS on being right. And if the facts of a situation assert themselves too strongly so that it appears he has made a mistake, he will either ignore those facts, lie, or reconstruct the conversation to make it seem like YOU, and not he, made the mistake. So much time is wasted with these acrobatics, all in service of the boss’ brittle ego. John is also almost pathologically controlling, like the worst kind of helicopter parent, but at the same time something like an absentee father in that he doesn't come in to work very often. He doesn't like to get his hands dirty by doing anything approaching busywork. He prefers to deal in theory, and is woefully ignorant of the realities of daily life at work. I suspect this is because he thinks busywork of any kind is below his station. But he never deigns to do this kind of work, even when it’s clearly warranted.