Pros: Fast-growing company. Can learn quite a few cutting-edge technical solutions. Good pay. Good working environment.

Cons: The RSU policy is too bad. You need to work with Asian R&Ds, so you need to have meetings with them at night. The performance rating is within the whole team, including Chinese colleagues. As we all know, they work so hard. You'll get burned out trying to keep up with their pace.

Pros: The CEO is the main pro. Otherwise, the benefits and offerings on campus are not even comparable to what other large companies in tech provide. The best perk is their fitness allowance, I guess. WLB is pretty good too because you don't really need to work, as the company is overhiring.

Cons: If you don't speak Mandarin, you're at a heavy disadvantage. 95%+ of the company is Chinese, so you'll have to get used to being in meetings where only Chinese is spoken and seeing the language spoken in the office and all your chat threads. Also, it's very obvious that everyone at the company is forced to do what satisfies HQ (aka "China Team").

Pros: 1. Scale & Impact TikTok is a giant platform with hundreds of millions (or billions) of users. The opportunity to work on features that get used globally — or to optimize video recommendation, performance, etc., at scale — is rare and exciting. You get to see features you touch used by millions within days. 2. Data-Driven Culture Decision-making is heavily data-driven. Metrics, A/B testing, analytics, and user behavior are deeply baked in. If you like working with numbers, instrumentation, and performance, this is a great environment. 3. Tech Challenges * High traffic, low latency, video streaming, content serving, recommendation algorithms, real-time features, and large-scale infrastructure. * Need for optimization: memory, bandwidth, caching, content delivery networks, etc. * Handling content moderation, globalization, localization, privacy & compliance across jurisdictions. 4. Resources & Ambition Big budgets, many engineers, and global reach. You’re less constrained by “can we do it technically?” and more by tradeoffs. You’ll find teams pushing boundaries, innovating (e.g., AI, AR/VR, video effects, etc.). 5. Learning & Growth Because the problems are hard and many, you’ll be exposed to topics you might not see in “smaller company” roles: distributed systems, ML/AI pipelines, real-time systems, security, and multimedia processing. Great for leveling up.

Cons: Challenges / Downsides 1. Pace & Demand It’s high pressure. Changing metrics, shifting priorities, and fast shipping cycles can lead to crunch periods or unstable requirements. 2. Bureaucracy & Silos With scale comes organizational complexity. Cross-team coordination and alignment with policy, legal, moderation, and content operations, etc., can slow things down. Sometimes you may feel decisions are not purely technical. 3. Cultural / Ethical Tension Because of its content, regulation, user growth, and scrutiny, work at TikTok often lives at the intersection of technology and societal concerns: content moderation, privacy, and misinformation. You may be required to implement features or constraints for compliance or political reasons. This can introduce moral weighting in engineering decisions. 4. Work-Life Balance Risk In some teams, the pressure to deliver, fix incidents, or meet metrics might push engineers into long hours or “always-on” mode. 5. Opaque Decision Making Sometimes, “why did we do it this way?” is driven by higher-level business or regulatory constraints not visible to your team. That can be frustrating if you don’t have visibility or influence.