It's difficult to encapsulate my time at Tiktok in the form of a few bullet points, so as a form of closure and just so people can be made aware of how toxic this org can be, I want to share my experience in more detail. TL;DR - if you care about your mental health at all, work anywhere else. During my 1.5 yrs on the U.S. User Growth team at Tiktok, I had 4 managers - the first (my hiring manager) who was VP U.S. Growth at the time and managed the team during my first 4 months, would be constantly late (20-40min) and unprepared for every team meeting, often stumbling over her words incoherently - we’d just sit there waiting, bewildered and would do our best to ignore her and focus on our projects. 3 peers resigned during this time, all alluding to her behavior and lack of leadership growth side in general. Turns out she was mostly traveling or attending parties at mobile industry / NFT conferences during this time. I know this because she wanted to be friends (given we were the same age) in which she divullged her drug fueled partying lifestyle at said conferences, explaining the unprofessional behavior during meetings. Re: job scope - I was brought in under the pretense the team there’d be opportunity to manage strategic initiatives paid media side (i.e. IOS 14.5+) In reality our team had been relegated to a small portion of the paid media budget and all strategy came from adjacent APAC growth teams in Beijing (and eventually Singapore), and was amid a very open and toxic turfwar in which the US team was removed from most UA duties, largely due to the reputation of my hiring manager and my peers who never touched their campaigns, one of which resigned shortly after I joined and the other clocked out as she was going out on maternity leave EOY. Rest of the team was coasting for years, working on occasional DEI/branding campaigns which were never run (b/c no one ran their campaigns). Fortunately one of my peers who had resigned left me with a major strategic partnership in the early stages which I wanted to see through (thus stayed amidst the chaos). Aside from this I spent the 4 months launching some of the most ridiculous campaigns for brand marketers and HR reps on the team (who couldn't fill engineering roles and wanted us to help find them candidates via ads). To start 2022 (month 5), manager #2 had come into the picture - presumably heading growth in India who acted like a tyrannical dictator and a huge, fragile ego that required us to respond immediately at off hours and send him emoji hearts to all his messages, to virtually bow down or face repurcussion. In our first meeting, he chastizes us b/c we were apparently supposed to run campaigns across the entire user lifecycle (paid media/UA, ASO, retention, growth product) in the US + CA/AU. Somehow I got blamed for this oversight in communication by my hiring manager (everyone on the team was too p*ssy to speak up), so I was now responsible for lifecycle marketing in 3 markets, while closing a partnership that was supposed to led by my hiring manager, and being the internal agency arm for the entire org. Needless to say I didn't sleep well for the next 3 months, as I was on calls/workstreams across 4 countries (SG, China, Australia, Canada, US PST/EST). During this chaotic quarter I was repeatedly reprimanded for working on the partnership (while not addressing the elephant NOT in the room), thus I was forced to secretly work on the deal a the request of BD/legal teams. Our team lost lost all paid media responsibilities (ex preloads, which I still managed) during this time. The bright spot was we got the contract for the partnership eventually signed, in which manager #2 threatened to pull the plug on the deal (since hiring manger #1 would get the credit) on a formality that we didn’t follow internal procedures (which we were never told about it). Due to political pressure from BD execs, he was forced to sign off, but then in retaliation removed me from all responsibilities except ASO for AU and launching ads for brand teams, in which he had promoted a peer (a data analyst ~5 years into his career) to head all Growth, thus now manager #3. Rather than give Manager #2 the satisfaction of me quitting, I stayed and accepted my new faker UA role and enjoyed the spare time, while dealing with Manager #3 who spent 4 months trying to build a case for firing me, by claiming in our weekly 1on1s that I was 'slow to respond’ (he and select members of my team would ping me at 6am my time and flag me if I didn’t reply immediately), openly antagonized me for working in Hawaii (the entire team/org was remote, and I had been approved to work from there to straddle APAC time zones since my colleagues over there actually worked on stuff), and being insubordinate by working on the partnership (even though no one else was around and willing to work on it on the team, and it was a net positive for the team/org). He eventually left for a data science role elsewhere after playing pretend Head of Growth for 6 months and left me a I rating (worse rating you could get) in my annual performance review (six months prior I had received an M- which is like a 3-4 equivalent), which prevented me from transferring into adjacent teams (which I was trying to do given the drop in team's scope and the toxicity). Also during this time, he and the legacy members of the US team took liberal amounts of PTO, either out on maternity leave, getting married, and/or traveling the world, and when they were present they’d take turns antagonizing me for working in Hawaii and had the audacity of insinuating I wasn't working enough (even though the majority of my responsibilities were taken away, and any attempts to work on anything that could grow the base substantially - i.e partnership w/ tmobile - were undermined). Work wise: they collectively focused their efforts on building a handful of FB/Google UAC ads to capture ‘seasonal content trends’, against my advice, in which they subsequently failed to acquire any new users. They’d ask me to build a report on performance, in which the graphic designer and creative ops would go around the org promoting their hard work via these reports I’d put together as they were attempting to lean in as ‘growth marketers’. At this point. I’d been openly backstabbed (repeatedly) by all the remaining members of the U.S. growth team, but decided to stick it out rather than resigning (which was manager #3’s goal) in the midst of the toxicity. Fortunately with manager #3 gone, I was able to finally see the partnership through and get subsequent preload campaigns launched, the only major win during my time there. The partnership had actually been suspended for several months due to suspicions from a few members of the partnering company (I'll let you guess what ethnicity and gender they were) that Tiktok was a CCP spy app. I don't want to get into the details (b/c it's pretty triggering), but let's say the experience was similar to that of the CEO with certain members of Congress recently. 4Q2023 was the highlight of my time, with this partnership finally underway and subsequent campaigns doing well, and manager #4 in the pipeline. Unfortunately, things didn’t go my way as the 4th manager (who was working remotely from the Brazil office) gave me an RTO ultimatum after initially stating he understood and supported my decision to work remote (since I was often working APAC hours). My responsibilities over preloads were moved to a centralized team in Singapore, partly led by my supposed direct report who never actually supported me data analytics side like she was originally assigned to, but instead spent her first year in growth & at TikTok undermining me and eventually taking over my work / cutting me out, and of course her manager - head of preload strategy - who strangely would message me at odd hours telling me how she was depressed and wanted to kill herself when I first joined, went radio silent when I had approached her about her direct report's insubordinate behavior, then also cut me out of future plans/projects) and after my request to re-scope my role before moving to LA was denied, I decided to quit and take some extended time off to recover from the experience. Looking back, I have a lot of mixed emotions. On one hand, I was able to learn/own the most profitable growth channel and be part of process (almost start to finish) in a strategic partnership that opened up new channels. On the other hand, all the toxicity resulting frrom the organizational chaos and in-fighting, absent or hypocritical leadership and a culture that just encouraged bad behavior left and right, really affected my self-confidence, and put me in a bad place mentally for a good part of last year, and I'm just now getting rid of the bitterness by deciding to share my experience rather than continuing to internalize it. So if you got this far, thanks for reading. And if there's a few pieces of advice I can give to make this time somewhat productive: - if you're pretty early in your career and really need a big name like TikTok on your resume, it COULD be worth the headache for 1-2 years but there's way better, relatively less toxic options out there and I can't recommend anyone to work here. The toxicity aside, chances are you're going to be in a pseudo admin role and be put in a position where you have to either be 1) dishonest about your contributions here or 2) be honest and come off negative and/or give the impression you're a coaster. Also, you can easily develop a TON of bad habits here, b/c literally there are no rules and people can get away with everything but murder here. You don't want to become one of those people long-term. - I'd also argue the brand equity isn't really there anymore because there's so much anti-chinese/Tiktok sentiment among U.S. tech hiring managers (taken from personal experience interviewing at dozens of mobile developers / startups), who tend to be mostly white Americans in leadership. - WHO you work with is more important than WHERE you work. Who cares if the app is successful, if the people suck - not worth it (unless it's your only/best offer and you really need the money) - Stay away from Tiktok or any other social media company if you want to work with adults. #tiktok #toxicworkculture #stayaway
oof im not reading all that why is TLDR the last sentence?
updated
Anyone who’s read the post please summarize in 100 words or less.
I read the first paragraph. Dude !!! It’s a Chinese company. I don’t know why you are surprised. As a person hired in US , it’s hugely doubtful you would be successful. It’s just common sense.
it was unfortunately my best option at the time, so just dove in to find out what the fuss was about. and boy did i find out
I’m just surprised you could work for TikTok while in Hawaii
i learned after the fact we technically weren't allowed to, but I was approved for it at the time so went ahead. Everyone on my team spent a month in Hawaii and many other places during the remote period. It all depends on the manager/team. I know some people who are still working remotely abroad till this day. which is hilarious given how big of a deal the org made RTO and it was such a contentious topic that resulted in a lot people (myself included) to churn. anyway fuck TikTok.
I read it all, doesn’t seem to be from an engineering pov (the work itself). But glad you’re out of that shit show. Peace
thanks for reading my mini vent. This was growth marketing side.
Lol it’s always the people who want to run seasonal UA campaigns that are kinda annoying
agreed. too many brand marketers who've weaseled their way into UA.
So you are Asian American and get picked on by white managers?
Toxicity has no racial bounds at TikTok. It's basically legacy employees vs the revolving door of talent that churn out b/c of the toxicity that do the actual work. My managers were a chinese american female (who was out on PTO literally 1/2 the time I was there), white american male (who was very openly anti chinese ironically, thus couldn't get anything done since he had burned the bridge with the entire APAC growth team), Indian guy from Dubai (tyrannical ego-driven man child), and lastly a Brazilian who gave me the ultimatum to return to Culver City (while he was working remotely in Sao Paolo).
Sorry to hear you had to go through all this. Hope you find a good team soon.
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