Pros: Elite Compensation & Growth: TikTok offers highly competitive, top-tier compensation packages and rapid career advancement driven by its fast-paced culture. Massive Scale: Employees get to solve complex technical challenges at a global scale, directly impacting over a billion active users with cutting-edge recommendation systems. High Velocity: With a strong bias for action and minimal bureaucratic red tape, you can own major projects and ship high-impact features incredibly fast.

Cons: Intense Work Culture: The demanding environment often leads to a poor work-life balance, featuring long hours and frequent late-night meetings to sync with global teams in different time zones. Geopolitical and Job Uncertainty: Constant regulatory scrutiny and political pressure create persistent external instability, which can impact long-term job security and equity value. Organizational Friction: Rapid scaling and cross-border operations frequently result in sudden reorgs, dual-reporting complexities, and shifting priorities that can be difficult to navigate.

Pros: Smart coworkers, lunch and dinner provided.

Cons: Work-life balance is awful. Lots of impromptu meetings on the weekends with coworkers in China. Pretty much all major business decisions take place at the Chinese HQ, and these meetings are conducted in Chinese. You will feel very disconnected from the product and culture of the company if you are not a Chinese-speaker. Little-to-no formal code review process; the company is more focused on short-term results than long-term maintenance. Bugs are everywhere on the development pipeline with little documentation for them. They are reported through group chat and will only be addressed once coworkers in China have time on their hands (very rare). Compensation isn't on-par with the rest of Silicon Valley.

Pros: - New office - Good TC - Free food

Cons: - Bad WLB - No career growth - Mental health hurt - Discrimination is normal - Bad manager