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• High pay and good insurance/benefits
• Free food
• Get exposed to new technologies

Please choose your team wisely.

I highly advise against joining the Recommendation team. HR will tell you all sorts of lies. I was told that the team is moving their documents to English and how I can write documents in English; none of these is true.

• No clear expectations of your role. I don't mean that there are no OKRs, but because there are no clear expectations of your level, your boss can always change the goalposts and say that you failed to meet expectations. Extremely biased boss that can either build you up in 1 minute or tear you down in the next minute.

• Culture that does not empower you to work. Always getting belittled by mentor and manager (e.g., from calling your ideas, saying you're not good enough, calling you out for being too slow). Shouting at you in a closed room when you make mistakes. Micromanagement with an extreme, aggressive attitude. Poor guidance during the onboarding phase.

• HR is never on your side. They take every opportunity to snitch on you. A lot of things are hidden and not brought to light; you've not much data to work around this toxic behavior.

• Long working hours, always getting pinged. There's so much inefficiency at work. The codebase is difficult to understand, poorly maintained, has no tests at all, and no proper tracing tool to troubleshoot issues. Most of the time you will be spent doing meaningless work.

As someone that doesn't write reviews, this is my first time sharing something like this. I would strongly advise against joining this department (other teams might be different, but long work hours and Chinese work culture still remain). If you value your own mental health and value being empowered at work, please don't join, even if you're offered high compensation (by the way, compensation doesn't increase yearly here). Trust me, it's just not worth it, even if you're just planning to stay for a year.