TikTok

• Frequent releases (every Tue and Thu)
• Large features
• CV-worthy technical experience complexity
• Above-average engineers in terms of market skills
• Good raises if you are the highest performing in the team.
• If you want money, work for TikTok but embrace all the cons.

Merge requests are enormous. Small size is 1k lines, average is 2-3k, and big size is 8k+.

Management cares about tech quality on paper. They enforce company-wide static code analysis and code coverage. In practice, they don't care.

Long working hours are caused by poor architecture agility.

It's impossible to get above M+.

It is good TikTok is moving really fast in business, but the architecture agility is pretty low. That's why engineers are working overtime quite a lot. Leadership cares about technical quality on paper, but they hardly launch any effective technical improvement projects.

I admit addressing the massive architecture agility problem is dirty work and has no business impact. It will have a good impact on long working hours and happier employees, though.

An option for low-cost, high-impact improvement: embrace open-source. Abandon ByteDance SDK and tooling projects (codebase CI, Java SDK, Bits, Dsyncer) because they are not world-class quality and just slow deployability and testability. They also encourage high maintainability by incurring more technical debt.

Plus, platform engineers take a long time to resolve on-calls. Why have them in the first place if they cannot support business agility?

I doubt the company will make changes, though. Long working hours and a high turnover rate are reality. Engineers doing the dirty work are underappreciated anyway.