Literally a traumatic experience
Pros
- Important to state that I worked for CapCut, not TikTok. More on that later; - You learn how synthesize information, which is something I wasn’t good at and picked up during my time there; - They ask for your last paychecks in order to understand your wage history and, in my case, offered a very decent circa 39% increase; - Kinda cool office but don’t expect it to be anywhere like Google or Facebook, I mean they’re MILES away from the other global big techs in that sense; - Not exactly a pro, but they’re kinda propense to a lot of experimentation with the product. However, these discussions are very top-down, they share to us what they’re doing, but rarely do they share with you how that decision was taken, which leads me to the cons.
Cons
- Again, this was my experience with the CapCut product, and I believe that the experiences between them can be very different. But then again, I cannot confirm that as well, so make sure to read the ratings from TikTok employees; - The structure of CapCut was very compartmentalized during my time there. The senior leadership was all located in China and we didn’t have a lot of access to them. There was few SOLID international collaboration other than what the Region Manager said she got from the senior leadership. I believe this is a very old-fashioned approach to work culture. All product employees deserve to know where the strategy is headed and why we do what we do. There’s a simple reason for that: it allows us know how to get the product there faster. Wether with input on UX features we believe could be improved from a content operation perspective and countless other ways we could cooperate with international teams; - There was a common group joke among the local employees, which actually wasn’t that funny, that despite the fact that we understood how burnout we all were, “there was still a lot of work to be done!”. Seriously, were we really normalizing the impact that this job was having on ALL of our mental healths? - The senior leadership once said we shouldn’t register our overtime hours if they were happening because we couldn’t manage our own time, only if we really had an extraordinary amount of work to get done that day. What they did not understand was that the “regular” workload was already obscene and, a lot of the times, just pointless overly-standardized reports; - Actually, they did not care if you were doing too many extra hours. Serious “just shut up and get your work done” vibes;
