Interesting work, toxic company - Senior Program Manager TikTok Employee Review

2.0
Dec 21, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Food and amenities are good -Coworkers (in US) are great, actual culture on the ground singlehandedly kept me sane -The actual work (at least in Ecommerce) is engaging and interesting

Cons

-Constant reorgs and direction changes mean forward progress on any given issue gets pulled under your feet constantly -Middle management (Leads+) is filled with wildly incapable people who are great talkers and weak thinkers. Most respond to whatever is stressing them out the most at any particular moment, regardless of how incoherent and strategically weak the result is. -Chinese teams are not fun to work with. I came from a technical background, and pretty much immediately made massive changes when I realized how primitive certain tooling/models were vs current US alternatives. These all passed BRD->PRD, and ended up being fairly successful. My boss (CN based) refused to consider any of these in my review cycle, and transferred me out of his org. I found out he gave the project I created to his personal favorite on the team, and it was implemented globally with virtually 0 changes from what I’d planned and built. -I also once helped a US analyst out by writing a BRD to solve a problem her org had. She proceeded to try to pass it off as her own despite not even requesting edit access to the doc until the week before presenting it. Unfortunately she changed it to be worse in virtually every regard and it failed. She completely screwed both of us, as I’d wasted two months working on it only for her to mangle it in a single week. -US employees are often not the sharpest knives in the drawer. CN employees are often very smart but mostly unhelpful. Throw in the generally cut throat attitude that prevails here and it’s a really cursed combo. -US based management is often clueless. Many have teams that expanded too quickly and managers don’t have a strong understanding of the work they’re doing.

Explore other reviews about TikTok

5.0
Jul 10, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good opportunities to grow as an engineer

Cons

Long working hours and meetings across time zones

2.0
Jun 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is level with industry and actual work is somewhat interesting depending on the team you're on

Cons

In my experience, career growth can feel very limited if you are not part of the dominant internal language and cultural network. A significant amount of important context, communication, and decision-making happens in Chinese, which can make non-Chinese-speaking employees feel excluded from key conversations and promotion opportunities. The environment did not feel as inclusive as it should be for a global company. Advancement often felt less tied to performance and more tied to whether you were connected to the right groups or able to operate fluently within the Chinese-speaking side of the organization. Over time, it felt like non-Chinese-speaking employees had fewer long-term career paths and were at risk of being replaced by people who could better fit that internal operating model. Things also move very slowly because employees are often given access only to the bare minimum needed to do their jobs. There is a heavy push toward using AI tools, but in practice it can make it harder to get help from real people. Instead of getting quick support, you often have to spend time going through AI bots or internal tools before getting a useful answer.

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