Outside looking in, working at TikTok can seem like a techie’s dream. The brand is instantly recognizable. The growth and success of the company is awe-inspiring. More often than not, when I tell people that I work at TikTok, their reactions are usually, “That’s awesome! I love TikTok!” Or, “I got so addicted to TikTok I deleted it off my phone..” I even had the good fortune of working on what I considered to be one of TikTok’s coolest product initiatives: the platform that helps creators make money from brand sponsorships. Doubly-awesome. For an admittedly prestige focused, laugh-til-you-cry-on-Tiktok person like me, this was my dream job…until it became a nightmare.

For those of you who have read TikTok’s Glassdoor and Blind reviews -

Spoiler alert: To me, it’s an oversimplification to say that TikTok is a tough company because of the lack of work-life balance. Yes, the hours there are unequivocally demanding. But in order to understand why, we first need to understand the major contributing factors, ranging from the company’s organizational decisions to geopolitics.

First, a recap.

In Part 1, I said that TikTok operates like a Chinese company with some Silicon Valley influence — not the other way around. The key decision makers at TikTok sit in China (and to a lesser extent, Singapore), and they define the working culture. US teams serve as more of a satellite office, with the purpose of being embedded in TikTok’s largest market.

It’s key to note that no product teams at TikTok operate independently from teams in China. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest drawbacks of product roles at TikTok. The vast majority of product teams are split across the US and China — meaning PMs, engineering, design, and other product roles within the same team sit in both the US & China, with heavy cross-dependencies on each other.

Before I joined, my interview panel sold me on a US-based work set up that never materialized. “Your team will transition to be fully based out of the US, so late hours with the China team will only be temporary,” they said. To be fair, I do believe TikTok wanted to move in this direction at the time. But the pandemic’s border closings and the geopolitical fiasco that ensued summer of 2020 (remember when Trump tried to ban TikTok?) appeared to harden Bytedance’s reserve to keep most — if not all — product teams inextricably tied to Beijing HQ.

My expectation vs. reality grid:

Given the split team, heavy China dependency dynamic, here’s my take on 4 dimensions of difficulty of working at TikTok: working culture, timezone & language differences, the pandemic, and geopolitics.

1. The Working Culture shock is real

The intensity of Chinese working culture is no mystery. Leaders in Beijing, Bytedance’s headquarters, define the company’s intense working culture, which seeps outwards to all of its satellite offices. 80+ hours a week, instant responses in the middle of the night, and a sheer dedication to work above all else: these are the norms in Tiktok’s China offices. Given more than half my team sat in China, we on the US team were not exempt from the same, crushing expectations of hours and productivity.

So how did TikTok manage to convince its employees in the US — many of whom came from SV tech giants like Google and Facebook — to work this hard?

They create a system that rewards speed above all else, and a key tactic is to cultivate intense competition between teams. I uncharitably call it a culture of “burn and churn.” Pit teams against each other, extract the maximum output, burn people out, and replace them. Rinse and repeat.

Since Tiktok & Bytedance have access to deep technical talent pools in China, they do not suffer from the usual labor constraints that plague US companies. Product teams can build the same or overlapping features with little consequence to the company. More than once, I discovered nearly identical mocks to my team’s product interface from another team that I had never heard of. A literal, copy + paste.The only differences would be that the buttons were a different shade of purple and the cards had rounded edges.

Upon escalation to leadership, their guidance was to “build separately for now, and we’ll integrate sometime in the future.” What’s unspoken was *how* they were going to determine which interface would get integrated. “Why is leadership not taking a stance to tie-break?” I fumed. “We’re just here, spinning our wheels, building redundant features!” After hearing multiple, similar stories, I realized — the competition is intentional. Overlap between teams is encouraged to speed up time to market and increase urgency. And the low transparency environment — where all documents are locked by default and even the org chart is obscured — just fanned the flames of our collective paranoia.

Every day, I’d ruminate. “Who else is building the same thing? Is my team working hard enough? Fast enough?” I felt like we were constantly falling behind, being out maneuvered. After all, our team could only “win” by shipping and delivering results faster than the others.

Nowhere in TikTok’s policy says you have to work 996 (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week.) But the terribly ingenious thing is — the system in place will have you work 996, anyway.

2. Long hours and inefficient communication, due to language barriers and time zone differences

Most folks in Silicon Valley like myself have “HQ privilege.” We’re accustomed to our company’s HQ being in Silicon valley — or at least within the US. Other regions work around our time zone. Other regions align with our cultural and language standards. Not so at TikTok.

Given Bytedance’s HQ is in Beijing, I had few hours of overlap with half my team, compounded by language barriers. Since more than half my product team sat in China, meetings with that team would start at 6 pm, and sometimes end as late as midnight. I gave up weeknight dinners with my husband, our favorite daily ritual to connect, relax, and unwind, in favor of hurried takeout in front of my laptop. The worst part was, my most stressful meetings like leadership reviews would often take place on Sundays or past 10 PM, leaving me anxious throughout my day and unable to sleep at night.

Language barriers exacerbated the difficulty of the time zones. Information flows were often incomplete because both sides found it too time consuming to translate. US teammates were often excluded from important discussions happening at HQ, and vice versa. Miscommunication ran rampant. It’s not surprising if you do the math: we had around 4 hours of overlap a day to collaborate instead of the usual 8 (or, if you work in China, 12.) Layer on language comprehension rate at 75% accuracy on both sides, with either the China team trying to use English (their second language), or the US team trying to use Chinese (for our team’s native speakers only.) So instead of having 8 hours a day to work together, we now had 3 — all of which are in our late evening. I often felt guilty for forcing my Chinese colleagues to speak to me in English, as my business Mandarin wasn’t proficient. Joining meetings, I’d catch them hurriedly using Chinese, and upon noticing me, whisper, “她来了，我们换成英文吧！” (“Oh, she’s here! Let’s switch to English now!”)

Unsurprisingly, our US & China teams cultivated mutual resentment and a lack of benefit of the doubt. Because let’s be honest — collaboration is already hard enough in the same language, in the same time zone, in person.

3. Inability to form trustful relationships with colleagues, due to the pandemic

The pandemic upended everyone’s way of working and collaborating. But the unique aspect of the pandemic’s role in my experience at Tiktok is how it caused my team in the US to have a drastically different working experience than that of my teammates in China. It was as though both teams were living in different years.. or different worlds.

Team dynamics were impacted by the fact that China had the pandemic under control, while the US did not. By the time I started at TikTok in July 2020, my teammates in China were already heading back into the office, having happy hours and offsites.

For my first “offsite” on the job, I remember dialing in to a video call at 9 PM to join the “team bonding” portion. It was month 5 of the pandemic quarantine, and I was exhausted from the isolation and lack of social connection. When the other side of my screen came into focus, I saw my entire team and managers in China sitting in a beautifully lit, glass paned office room, all chatting and laughing — on a high from their trip to Shanghai Disneyland the prior day. At that moment, I didn’t think I could possibly feel more jealous and miserable in my entire life.

At the end of the day, humans are emotional beings. Proximity matters. It matters for collaboration, for relationship building, for career progression. Our US & China teams sacrificed tremendously for each other in our attempts to collaborate. We gave up hours of our lives and family time (China teammates got up super early, we stayed up super late), language comprehension (English vs. Chinese), project scope…yet we barely knew each other at all. The more we had to collaborate, the more we had to sacrifice, to the point where collaboration felt zero sum. We had no way to visit each other in person, as much as we wanted to. To this day, I still wonder if I could have had a far more positive experience if I just got a chance to visit my team, and they got to visit me.

4. Geopolitics defined our destiny.

From Trump’s ban to China’s crackdown on high-flying tech companies, I’m constantly reminded that geopolitics is the heavy hand that shapes the company’s decisions — as well as the fate and fortunes of everyone who works there. Yes, Bytedance is the first Chinese social media company to achieve international success, but they also became the poster child of the US & China conflict; a company caught in the crosshairs. During the deliberation over Trump’s ban, I worried about what would happen to my job and my team. When the Chinese government clamped down on big tech companies that listed on US exchanges, my heart sank. I and many others on my team hoped that Bytedance would be listed in the US. And as US China relations further degrade over the war in Ukraine, I doubt the IPO will happen anytime soon, and I don’t see a path towards Bytedance listing in the US or even Europe. Hong Kong is far more likely.

Whenever I thought too hard about the geopolitical risks while working at Bytedance, I’d experience an existential crisis where I felt that everything that I poured my effort into could be for naught. A successful US TikTok ban, one policy change by Xi Jin Ping— it all could come tumbling down.

It’s tempting to paint TikTok/Bytedance as the “Evil Corp,” out to make their employees’ lives miserable. But despite my grievances, I don’t think this is the case. There are many well-intentioned and kind hearted people at Bytedance, including at the leadership level. For employees in China, intense working cultures are simply the everyday reality of working at big, Chinese tech companies. The Chinese labor markets are super competitive and power skews in the company’s favor; there are far more Chinese workers vying for jobs at top Chinese tech companies than in the US.

The core issue is that Bytedance applies the same systems and working cultures they use in China onto US teams, by forcing cross-country dependency and having teams directly roll up into China-based managers and leaders. To people like me, who have only worked at Silicon Valley companies, the Bytedance working culture felt exploitative, and its organizational structures seem nonsensical. Working there, I marveled at the privilege of my past self, and the seemingly trivial problems that I used to complain about at Facebook and Roblox. My past life felt like a distant dream — a time when meetings ended around 5 PM. A time when Sundays weren’t full of dread and nausea. A time when I didn’t, on a near daily basis, take out the full force of my work frustration on my family.

On the other side

5 months have passed since I left Tiktok. The pain has faded but the learnings remain.

I learned that career prestige isn’t worth my mental and physical health.

I learned that setting boundaries at work is a strength, not a weakness.

I learned that a company’s culture will change me far more than I will ever change it.

I learned that I can never put myself in another position where work becomes all-consuming, because it makes me become the worst version of myself to the people I love the most.

To Tiktok & Bytedance leadership: You’re at the helm of a once-in-a-generation company that provided me, and many others, with amazing opportunities. But you need to learn to take care of your people and retain the talent that you have. While you can’t control the course of geopolitics, you can control how you support your employees. My feedback here is not unique, and for the sake of the company I hope you one day listen.

To my readers: Thank you for following along my journey. It’s been an honor to share my story with you. I hope I satisfied some of your curiosity around TikTok, and helped you reflect a bit more on your own career journey.

What’s next for me, you ask?

I’m still exploring, enjoying my time in the Great Resignation. While I can’t tell you what the future holds, I can tell you this: you probably won’t find me at another Chinese company ;)

Photo credit and special thanks to my husband, Justin, who served as my editor for this series. Thank you for all your love and support, and for putting up with me through our toughest years together.

❤ Melody

If you read my Part 1 post, you may be wondering why anyone would want to take a job at TikTok. Although my time at TikTok was one of the toughest stretches in my existence, I did get a lot out of my time there, too. It’s extremely important for me to be fair in my evaluation of my experience because that’s my truth.

This article, Part 2, will go into the reasons that kept me at the company for nearly a year and a half. To my more invested readers — I know I initially said there would only be 2 parts to my TikTok series. I lied, sorry! If you’re wringing your hands in frustration, thinking, “But I want the tea on TikTok now!” — feel free to skip this article and stay tuned for Part 3. (I’ll only judge you a little bit.) For everyone else, thanks for indulging me!

So why did I stay at TikTok for as long as I did?

Answer: The Career Opportunity & the Cross Cultural Learning

TikTok is a relatively young company in the hyper-growth stage backed by the seemingly endless resources of Bytedance. Bytedance’s 2021 revenue reached a whopping $58 BN, and you may have heard that TikTok recently surpassed 1 billion users besting competitors like Instagram and Youtube in reaching this milestone. With this type of growth comes some huge career opportunities, as well as eye-opening exposure into how Chinese companies operate and succeed.

At TikTok, if you can think it, you can (usually) build it.

When I first joined the company, I was stunned by the laundry list of products that the team wanted to build by the end of the year (I joined in July.) Keep in mind that list didn’t even include the products that I potentially wanted to build. Immediately, I thought about how to prioritize. My tenure at other Silicon Valley companies — even famously well-staffed companies like Facebook — hammered into me that we’re always people constrained. As a Facebook exec once said, “it’s not prioritization unless it hurts.”

I quickly found out that that prioritization is not a core pillar of planning at Bytedance. And the key lay in the fact that we were rarely ever people constrained. Sure, engineering, design, and product talent was more challenging and expensive to recruit in the US, but recruiting in China appeared to be a non-issue. Oftentimes, if our teams couldn’t hire talent quickly enough in the US, the leaders would turn to filling those roles in China so there weren’t any significant, extended gaps in staffing. Not to mention, people in China work a lot more than people in the US, and that culture permeated to us in the US as well. To Bytedance, more people, more hours per person = more productivity.

This dynamic obviously comes with heavy costs, which I’ll go into further in Part 3. The upside, however, is if you have a good idea as a PM, chances are you can build it and ship it with your team in a relatively short period of time. The product review processes at Bytedance are optimized for approval throughput and speed, and product & engineering teams will do whatever it takes to ship fast. In fact, Bytedance was the first place I’d ever worked where I had engineers ping me and my PM team for more work. Shocking, I know! At many big Silicon Valley companies, the opposite is usually true — you have a good idea, then you have to make sure it fits into your prioritized roadmap; you sell it to your team, then to your leads, to execs, and horizontally with other product teams to make sure that you’re not stepping on any other team’s toes or duplicating efforts. Unfortunately, you’ll likely be overlapping with other teams in one way or another, and the probability that you’ll get clearance to build and ship your product gets reduced after all the red tape. As a PM at Bytedance, I found out that I do work twice as hard, but I had 2x-3x the product output that I may have had at larger Silicon Valley companies. Which brings me to my next point:

PMs get big scope regardless of tenure or years of experience.

There’s a running joke in the PM community about working at big, established tech companies. “You’ll be the PM that owns a button,” they say. “Your full-time job will be to argue with other PMs about the color of the button.” Classic, Silicon Valley “nightmare.” At TikTok, no PM just owns a button, at least as far as I know. Instead, the issue — and opportunity — is that PMs are often given scope that can feel too big to handle.

Even with years of PM experience under my belt, I’ve been struck by the size of the problem space to tackle. I remember myself thinking — “Where do I even begin?” when tasked with leading our marketplace demand generation pillar. I’ve seen PMs only a few years out of school, or folks in their *first* PM job who are leading big, strategic, initiatives. (Side note: Yes, TikTok takes chances on first-time PMs. For those of us who managed to survive the Silicon Valley PM gauntlet, this is pretty mind-blowing.) I’ve seen new PMs put together multi-year product vision docs that they present to leadership. I’ve seen more junior PMs own and launch large swaths of our developer platform like our Login Kit, or revamp our entire creator onboarding flow to enable more monetization opportunities for creators. Despite the constant discomfort of being thrown into the deep end, we learned to swim, and got an experience and product portfolio that we likely could not have gotten elsewhere.

TikTok has insane product market fit.

The app has massive business potential for a reason. Ever feel the urge to buy something because you saw your favorite creator promote it on TikTok, only to realize you can’t purchase it directly within TikTok? And then you find a way to buy it anyway because you’re so convinced that this is going to change your life? I certainly have, and many others have, too. That’s the power of TikTok — it succeeds and sells despite its shortcomings.

As a PM in the monetization org, I felt empowered and excited knowing that there was overwhelming demand from advertisers and creators for our ads and creator collaboration tools. I heard the evidence in every advertiser call, every creator interview. Top tier advertisers still spent on our ads platform and pinged creators for branded collaborations despite not having all the proper tools and analytics. Creators clamored to cut more brand deals and coordinated with advertisers through Instagram DM (big facepalm.) Trust me when I say that it’s an amazing feeling to see the demand for our products — I’ve worked at companies where the product market fit was not there, and we had to bend over backwards and go off roadmap for a tiny handful of brands’ leftover, experimental budget. It’s not fun. For my team at TikTok, it came down to figuring out the right product strategies to “turn on the faucet all the way,” by facilitating the types of interactions we wanted by building better tools, and capitalizing on that market opportunity with solid execution.

Of course, not all of my team’s products were resounding successes. But we were fortunate to have a handful that really hit the mark. The reception from brands, creators, partners, and the press felt explosive. The excitement, infectious. It was in those rare moments that the fleeting thought would cross my mind: “Maybe, this was worth it.”

Finally, I got a rare glimpse into how Bytedance succeeds in China and beyond.

I learned that Bytedance takes some wildly different approaches from what social media behemoths like Facebook take in the US & Western markets. One of the biggest ideological differences I witnessed between these two tech styles is the adherence to what we call the “closed loop” vs. “open loop” strategy.

Broadly speaking, a “closed loop” strategy entails that the company is not willing to share data with 3rd parties, and cannot be dis-intermediated from the transactions on their platform. Closed loop strategies usually optimize for centralized control, and high data visibility since everything is done on-platform. Bytedance’s strategies tend to be more closed-loop in nature.

An “open loop” strategy means that the company is willing to share data with 3rd parties (usually via APIs) without a heavy hand on how the data is used, so long as the data usage doesn’t violate developer terms of service. Open loop strategies optimize for quickly scaling up the company’s footprint through its 3rd party ecosystem, while trading off centralized control and some data visibility. As you probably guessed, open-loop tends to be Facebook’s mode of operation.

A Closed Loop vs. Open Loop Example

(A deeper dive for my fellow PMs & creator economy nerds out there!)

Let’s take creator data sharing as an example. Firstly, what do I mean by “creator data sharing?” Let’s say Nike wants to work with creators and influencers on Tiktok and Instagram (IG) to promote their new sneaker line. How would Nike figure out which creators to work with? They would need access to TikTok and IG creator data, so they can figure out which creators to choose based on who’s a sneaker-head or athlete, how many followers they have, how engaged their following is, and what demographic profiles their followers are.

When it comes to Instagram, Nike has several different ways to discover and work with the right creators. (For the sake of simplicity, I highlighted 3 ways though there are more avenues that exist!)

• Nike can source interesting sneaker-head creators from their IG feed, and DM or email creators to coordinate
• Nike can use Instagram’s Brand Collabs Manager to do faster filtering and sorting.
• Nike can use a 3rd party software platform like Captiv8 which pulls in creator data from Instagram’s APIs to find the creators who are the best fit, and work with creators directly through those platforms.

Because Instagram has APIs that share basic creator data with 3rd parties, we designate Instagram as taking the “open loop strategy” because access to this data is relatively open, and there’s no “right” way to work with creators. Overall, the open loop, laissez faire approach has benefited IG creators and the 3rd parties that support them — it’s estimated that global spend on IG creators reached $8 billion in 2020, and nearly 90% of all influencer campaigns include Instagram creators. But if you ask anyone at Instagram how many brand deals are done through the platform as a whole, or how much brands are paying IG creators, you’ll probably get a hand wavy estimate at best, or a “I don’t know…a lot?”, at worst.

Now, let’s talk about Douyin, Tiktok’s sister app (also owned by Bytedance), which serves the China market. Douyin operates in a “closed loop” fashion. If Nike were trying to source and work with Douyin creators, there’s only 2 options available: using Douyin’s first party, creator collaboration tool called Starmap, or using an agency that uses Starmap. Starmap has no APIs for 3rd party integrations to my knowledge. In fact, every step of Nike’s collaboration with creators must take place on Starmap, from the outreach all the way to the payments. Sounds like the opposite approach of Instagram, right? Here’s the thing: in China, Starmap’s business grew at a dizzying speed, fueled by Douyin’s dominant position in the market. It didn’t matter that Starmap had no 3rd party developer ecosystem. They facilitated brand deals for tens of millions of creators per year within 3 years. Every deal is tracked, GMV logged down to the cent. You can probably imagine how scarily sophisticated and effective the Starmap platform is with that level of data fidelity coupled with its sheer volume of deals.

Negotiating between the Bytedance way and the Facebook way of developing products in my attempt to fuse the best of both worlds was one of the most challenging, but also eye opening and rewarding experiences I’ve had in my career. As my team and I were trying to push through the TikTok Creator Marketplace API for the ex-China market, I couldn’t help but think — “Facebook’s way is the best way. Bytedance is too controlling. Just let the market do it’s thing!”

But I learned that we couldn’t get company leadership behind our proposal if we didn’t address their concerns on the open loop approach and make certain concessions. The pushback from some execs during product review was telling. “Why should we entertain an open looped approach?” they’d ask. “Bytedance succeeded in doing things in the closed loop way. Just look at how well Starmap is doing!” Another chimed in. “If we release these APIs, then what will happen to our first party platform?” It was interesting seeing my bias reflected back at me in the opposite direction. To these execs, the Bytedance way was the best way. And we were not wrong for our respective markets. In China, tech companies are famously hyper competitive against one another, and it’s often strategic to hold your most valuable data and assets close to your chest. Bytedance was rife with anecdotes of competitors and startups copying the company’s products and scraping and selling its data as their own. At US companies like Facebook, there’s more trust and an understood give-and-take between itself and 3rd parties (though the relationships can still be tenuous at best.)

These cross-market negotiations definitely felt as though they took a few years off my life. In the end, I’m thrilled we launched the APIs, and I feel proud that my team and I were able to find a compromise between building an open loop solution that mostly aligned with industry standards in the Western markets while retaining certain closed loop elements that could help improve the product in the long run.

Some of my bigger learnings:

• Industry standards for product development can vary drastically between US & Chinese companies. This may seem obvious, but it was tough and humbling for me to confront my biases on what I considered to be the true, gold standard approaches for social media monetization from what I saw at Facebook. I had gotten accustomed to somewhat lazier, regional assumptions for adoption across our highest monetizing markets, such as “Western Europe typically just follows the US.” Market realities such as competition, industry first movers, and government policies play too key of a role in shaping what works and what doesn’t work, and the US and China are completely different beasts. Succeeding in both markets requires a willingness to take some seemingly contradictory approaches. I’m curious to see if the hybrid approaches that my team and I have taken will continue to live on, or if these products will evolve in the image of either the Bytedance or Facebook models.
• It’s essential for global companies to learn what features are globally resonant vs. those that must be more market specific: TikTok has globally successful and exportable technologies such as its world class content recommendations algorithm — basically what makes people addicted to their Tiktok feeds around the world. However, we also learned that features like advertising and creator marketing cannot be copy-pasted from China to the US, and require considerably more market specificity (more closed loop in China, more open loop in US/Western markets.) Bytedance learns these nuances and the balancing act of these strategies by having a willingness to experiment and fail fast, supported by a large, competitive workforce.
• Bytedance is an unbelievably impressive company. While I do not agree with the way they approach many aspects of their operations, from some of their product strategies to working culture, it’s hard to not be amazed by how much the company has achieved in such a short period of time. I’m blown away by the creativity and sophistication behind their tools in China, like Starmap. I’m in awe of how quickly they’ve moved to get their monetization and creator tools up to par with Western competitors. And of course, the smash success of TikTok across the world is proof of their dominance, in and of itself.

Working at TikTok stretched me in more ways than I could count, and taught me more about product strategy, execution, and cross cultural nuances than I could have initially imagined. But as you’ve now come to expect, these learnings came at an enormous price. The cross-cultural perspective I gained working through US & China tech company differences became the sharpest, double edged sword I’d ever wielded. Almost no aspects of my life were left unscathed by the intensity and sheer difficulty of the job, from my closest relationships to my physical and mental health. Ultimately, the amazing learning opportunities at the company could only keep me there for so long. More on this, in Part 3.

Thanks for reading ❤

Hi, I’m Melody! I left my PM job at Tiktok 3 months ago, after nearly a year and a half at the company. During my tenure and even after I left, I’ve received so many questions about what it’s like to work there from job seekers contemplating an offer, curious friends, my family -

How was it at TikTok? Are the rumors of working 996 (9 AM-9 PM, six days a week) actually true? Does it feel like a Chinese company, or a Silicon valley company?

I’d like to think that I’ve done some hard things in my career thus far. I joined Facebook right after undergrad, and spent 5 years in a variety of product roles. I’ve spoken at F8, and helped to oversee the growth of the ads API from $1BN to $15BN in revenue. I’m a builder at heart, so I learned how to code and pivoted into a full stack engineering role at Nextdoor. Then, I joined Roblox before its IPO and lead the development of Premium payouts, a new way for the 21,000+ developers on our platform to monetize based on creating engaging content within their games.

But working as a lead product manager at TikTok during the pandemic was by far my hardest career experience yet. 3 months after leaving the company, I figured it’s time to share my story.

There’s so much I want to talk about, it frankly terrifies me. In an attempt to make this less overwhelming, I plan to do a 2 part series. In Part 1 (this piece) I’ll dive into what goes on through my head as I answer TikTok questions from candidates, and my ultimate verdict on my TikTok experience. In Part 2, I’ll go more in depth about TikTok’s opportunities, and the key challenges I faced working at the Chinese-owned company.

My typical candidate conversation

“Thanks so much for hopping on a call with me, I really appreciate it!” Her bright voice rang over the phone. She would be the 15th person that reached out to me to ask me about my experience at TikTok. “I just got a PM offer here, and I wanted to ask you about your experience to help with my decision. We both worked at Facebook, so I figured we had some shared experience to compare to!”

I took her call because I completely empathize with her position, and I wanted to help her with diligence for the decision. Back in June 2020, I agonized over whether or not I should take my TikTok PM offer, grasping at straws trying to find someone, even a 2nd or 3rd degree connection, who worked at TikTok and could speak frankly about their experience.

There was so much I wanted to tell her, and I struggled with this every call I had. “TikTok is an incredible place,” I began. “At Tiktok, I did some of the best work in my career -”

“Wow, that’s really saying something!”

I nodded, yes. “I had the privilege of leading a talented product team. We launched TikTok’s first creator marketplace API. This helps creators get discovered by brands, and allows them to make more money from branded content deals. We also reshaped the team’s strategy of working with creator agencies, and helped to revamp our first party, creator and brand collaboration tools. Honestly — I’m not sure if I would have gotten this type of opportunity at Facebook.”

“That’s so awesome! What about the people?”

I thought about all the friendships I made, with both peers and my managers. “I’ve been lucky to work with a solid team, and I’ve made friends with both US and China colleagues. Keep in mind that product leadership is in China. It takes some time to make friends and build trust though, being remote and all.” It had been extraordinarily difficult to build relationships during the pandemic especially with teammates in China. Relationships that would usually take 2 weeks to establish in person now took over six months — or were never established at all. The friendships I did have with certain teammates, though, were strong and battle tested. “There are people here that I would work with again in a heartbeat, or hire immediately if I ever started my own company.”

“That’s so great to hear — people are so important to every job.” She continued. “I’ve also heard some pretty tough stories about TikTok, I’ve been reading the Glassdoor reviews. Lack of work life balance comes up time and time again. What’s that been like?”

I’d heard this concern from every person I spoke to, every candidate I interviewed. I debated furiously about how vulnerable I should be with this woman I had just met. “TikTok can be a tough, intense place,” I began. “I did some really great work with my team, but it came at a really high cost.” Thinking about the costs to my personal life and health made me slightly nauseous. “I work over 60 hours a week. Over half my team sits in China, so my meetings with China teammates start at 6 PM and end at 10 PM..sometimes later.”

“Got it. I think I read something similar online as well.”

I pressed on, trying to hit home the impact of the sacrifice. “I had little to no personal life during the week, and I had to work some Sunday evenings because that’s Monday in China. You’ll need to be able to handle that. Your family needs to be able to handle that.” I thought about all the weeknight dinners I couldn’t enjoy with my husband, eating in front of my laptop instead. I pretty much only saw him at bedtime, because he’d wake up earlier than me to start work. I was too embarrassed to admit that the pressure and the hours caused me to seek therapy. Then marriage therapy. My weight had dropped precipitously and I had trouble sleeping. I barely ever saw my elderly parents even though they lived close by.

“Got it. Yes, this is something that I will need to discuss with my husband as well. I have 2 young kids, you know.”

I sighed inside. “I see.” Personally, I would not have taken the job if I had kids, but that was her decision to make. Some people at the company have certainly made it work as parents, but it required a taxing schedule and extra help at home. In fact, most people on my team were not yet married, had no kids, and were younger than me.

“You’ll have to sprint here, and you’ll probably work harder than you ever have.” I felt like I needed to end the call with more directive advice. “If your goal is to push as hard as you can in your career for a well-defined period and accomplish a lot of impactful work, and if you have the support of your family, go for it. Realize that your tenure may be shorter because you can’t sprint forever.” I was past my burnout point for months now. “But if you prioritize sustainability, balance, more time for family, community, hobbies — or if you want to work at a company for many years through different life stages, I’d look elsewhere.”

She thanked me again for my time, and we hung up.

In summary

• Tiktok provided me with incredible opportunities to lead major product initiatives from 0–1, and for this I am immensely grateful. These types of opportunities can be much more difficult to come across at more established, Silicon Valley companies.
• A high level of personal sacrifice is required to work at TikTok. I found myself dedicating my entire life to my work at TikTok. My personal interests, time with my family, and mental and physical health took a distant back seat, and at times ceased to exist entirely.
• TikTok operates more like a Chinese company with some Silicon Valley influence — not the other way around. Decision making power and leadership teams sit predominately in China and Singapore. As a result, there are several dimensions of difficulty with Tiktok’s product roles — working culture, language barriers, time zone differences, and the pandemic.
• My advice for people evaluating a Tiktok product opportunity is to be extremely intentional about why you’re joining, and what you want out of this experience. This is important for every career move, but an opportunity at TikTok demands utmost thoughtfulness given the personal sacrifice required to succeed.

My verdict, 3 months after leaving

If I knew that working at TikTok would cost me this much, I would have never taken the job. June 2020 me would have run for the hills.

But now that I’ve reached the end of my time there, and I’ve had more time to pause, reflect, and process — I’m grateful for the experience, and I don’t regret joining. I’ve learned more and accomplished more than I ever thought I could in a relatively short period of time. I’ve proven to myself that I am resilient, and that I do have what it takes to succeed and lead within one of the toughest, cross-cultural company cultures. I have far more clarity on what I want and don’t want in my next career move.

You might be asking yourself — what exactly was so hard about working at this company? What made TikTok different from other Silicon Valley companies, and what kind of opportunities did I find myself staying for? I’ll discuss this in my next article, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading ❤️