TikTok reviews

-Our user and business growth has far outpaced the number of improvements needed in our infrastructure. Very basic processes like billing or creating an account in CRM continue to be extremely painful bottlenecks, despite constant pleas to get better systems. -No org charts anywhere, while positioned as some sort of rebellion against hierarchy, actually creates difficulty. It's very hard to finds out who owns a process, tool, or project (unless you happen to know someone who knows someone who's working on it). -Having all product teams sit in China means we have no visibility into roadmaps. Major product updates are released with no forewarning and no proper marketing materials or training. It seems like the product marketing teams are always scrambling to keep pace with our solutions.

- There is a pattern of consistent and underlying gaslighting at TikTok that I have witnessed over my many years working there. I think this is largely driven by poor HR practices. You see this cascade through levels of management where leaders and individual HR members are complicit in continuing it down to their directs & stakeholders in order to do a good job at their roles and keep discontent from employees at a minimum.Examples of this: convincing employees that they are wrong when they come with comp concerns, setting unachievable goals or moving the goal posts, changing policies that they'd previously indicated, over-relying on top performers to carry teams but not rewarding them, giving individuals management roles but stripping their autonomy to make decisions at it applies to their business, leaders who aren't really making decisions but are having decisions dictated to them - Culture of individual self promotion externally - Comp & benefits is truly subpar, the current stock buy back program is evidence of this. ByteDance already devalued RSUs for employees last year to "make the company more attractive to future hires" and has further devalued stocks by offering a different buyback price for former employees than current. Their value just keeps getting lower and lower. I genuinely think many people hold on because they keep hoping it'll pay off rather than just cutting bait on something that's actually becoming less valuable over time - The "360" performance review isn't real and it takes most people about 3 review rounds to see that. Your success is determined by your manager, their sway, their results, whether or not they like you, and the overall forced distribution - Performance review is used as a chance to change the levels of employees who have been "promoted" in the middle of the period, rather than actually reward high performance - No merit increases. Your performance "raises" or any raise from a role change (unlikely to happen) slowly get eaten up by inflation. It's very difficult to tangibly increase your comp - Pockets of bad bad lack of work life balance