Kind coworkers, horrible organizational structure
Pros
- Having the 'TikTok' name on your resume - Increasingly less so, but TikTok is still comparatively nascent, so you have a lot of opportunity to build new things.
Cons
- Pay; not even close to competitors. First offer I received was 15% below what I was making at another company, despite sharing minimum salary requirements. The only reason I accepted was because of the allure of stock, which is probably useless, and a one-time cash sign-on bonus. - Structure: There is no org chart because of "flat" structure (I use in quotes because it is a 100k person company, flat is impossible). I spent significant amounts of time just trying to figure out who was working on what and where I go to for x,y,z. (E.g. Need to talk to legal? Good luck, hope someone on your team knows!) -Commission Structure: Full transparency, i did not have a commission-based roll, but what I observed and can confirm is that pay is much more variable/less guaranteed than someowhere like a Meta, Alphabet. Maybe this will get better, but advertisers still are spending nowhere near the amount of money they spend on other platforms, and they kind of still use it for 'one-off' campaigns vs. just always on search ads, etc. This can make it kind of tough for predicting commission. - Executive Leadership: This stems from the heavily influenced Chinese culture, but I worked there for 2 years and I don't know who the leadership teams are. Meta, Alphabet, Apple, etc all have all hands with executives and pretty regular communications from leadership teams. None of that at TikTok at all. No transparency at all - you need to know what you're working on, the rest is oddly secretive. - Future: Feels pretty uncertain - the looming "TikTok ban" of course adds nervousness to the some 10k+ US employees. - China Based: If you work in/around engineering and do not speak Mandarin, expect significant difficulties in communication. They hire PMs who, I don't feel would ever cut it in terms of experience at an Alphabet, Meta, etc, because they need someone who speaks Mandarin. Definitely an adjustment having all of your HR, onboarding, entire email inbox in Mandarin. - Stock Comp: At least when I got my offer, the main selling point was "pre-IPO stock". Honestly, I don't think this company will over go public based even just off the amount of disclosures this would require.