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Free meals, decent office benefits, and some standard big-tech perks. Depending on the team, there can be opportunities to work on high-scale products and learn from strong individual engineers.

The biggest issue is the management environment. In my experience, some managers create a culture where people focus more on self-protection, blame-shifting, and internal politics than actually solving problems. When issues happen, the first reaction is often to identify who can be blamed rather than how the team can fix the root cause.

This makes normal coworker relationships difficult. People become cautious, defensive, and unwilling to take ownership because they are afraid of becoming the next person blamed. Instead of encouraging collaboration, the environment can push employees into internal competition and conflict.

Management should be responsible for building a healthy team culture. It should not be the employee’s job to repeatedly teach leadership how to create a fair, collaborative, and psychologically safe environment. If employees are expected to identify the problems, design the solutions, and drive the culture improvement themselves, then it raises the question of what leadership is actually contributing.

Diversity and inclusion can also be a real issue in some teams. The workplace may look global from the outside, but day-to-day collaboration can be dominated by one language and one cultural background. Many meetings, informal discussions, and even internal documents are in Chinese, which can make the environment difficult for people who are not already part of that language or cultural circle. Even when employees from other backgrounds join, they may still need to adapt to this informal language environment in order to fully participate. This creates barriers to inclusion and makes the workplace feel less open than a global company should be.

Work-life balance is another major concern. Because many teams need to collaborate with China-based teams, meetings can regularly happen late at night, sometimes around midnight or even 1–2 a.m. Leadership may say that employees should reduce late meetings, but the underlying cross-region dependency is not actually solved. In practice, employees still have to attend those meetings because otherwise the work cannot move forward. The message sounds good, but the actual system does not support a healthy work-life balance.

Technical depth varies a lot by team. Some teams have strong engineering challenges, but others are more execution-heavy and process-heavy. Career growth also depends heavily on the manager and team environment.

Company policies should be reviewed carefully. Some policies, especially around equity vesting and employee benefits, can feel designed in a way that is not very employee-friendly. Employees should read the details closely instead of assuming the benefits are as strong as they appear at first glance.

Build a healthier management culture. Leaders should focus on solving problems, protecting the team, and improving systems instead of pushing responsibility downward when things go wrong. A good manager should create an environment where employees can collaborate, take ownership, and discuss problems honestly without fear of being blamed.

Leadership should also take responsibility for creating an inclusive workplace. Important meetings, documentation, and decision-making should be accessible to all employees, not only to people who share the same language or cultural background.

For work-life balance, leadership needs to solve the structural problem instead of only telling employees to avoid late meetings. If cross-region collaboration requires employees to work at midnight, then the process, ownership model, and team structure need to be redesigned.