TikTok reviews

Right from the beginning, the job I was hired for never indicated in their job requirements that Mandarin was needed. On my first day, I come to learn that all training documents are in Mandarin, all the group chats for my team are in Mandarin, and the system that I am working on 90% of the time is completely in Mandarin. There was also little to no onboarding, so I had to hit the ground running with what little Mandarin I knew. Being only 1 of 2 people in North America in my team (the rest are in China), it meant that any help or questions I had could only be routed to this team member, who was extremely unhelpful and hostile. It almost felt like I was a threat or burden to her, so all questions about how to do certain things were met with questions back (ie. "Does this make sense?" or "What do you think?"). After bringing concerns of this to my director, I was gaslit and told that the job did ask for someone with proficiency in Mandarin. I threw the copy of the job description (nowhere did it indicate Mandarin was required) in their face and called it quits from there. tl;dr - Don't work here. Extremely toxic environment that revolves about the people in China (who are the ones who make decisions), a lot of gaslighting, and the working culture is horrendous.

- Horrible work life balance. you'll hear recruitment and management say that TikTok is "fast paced" constantly. This really means "work 10-12 hours per day on so many projects you can barely keep your head above water." - working long hours isn't just department based. Virtually everyone from marketing, product, design, swe work around the clock. It's very common for both China and US colleagues to message you through the night until 12am and expect immediate answers. - if you work on projects with China or have a manager in China you will be expected to attend late night meetings (often after 8pm) - People often work on their PTO and before taking time off it's common for co-workers to say "I'll be checking my lark messages." - all tools are internal bytedance tools which can take some getting used to