[not a review of the UK office, but global) Don’t waste your energy, it’s not worth it. - Program Manager TikTok Employee Review

1.0
22 Mar 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Smart and driven/ hardworking peers

Cons

Where do I begin? Poor leadership (constant reshuffles in teams/ roles/ leaders). They have no idea of a strategy and constantly change orgs. You will never have an opportunity to see your hard work bear fruit. Over hiring/ imbalanced workload: you will see some people barely doing any work and getting by, whereas others slogging and dying. All within the same team. People management here is an absolute joke. Toxic environment: Ties back to the first point on leadership. Leaders here are incompetent mostly. They have no clue what they are doing, no long term vision, no people management skills, no workload distribution/ management skills. People who suck up flourish and those who just focus on delivering on OKRs get crushed regardless. Top down structure: you will rarely get an opportunity to be innovative here. Projects and workload is all top down and you can’t say no even if you don’t agree with the direction. And to top it all off, the the deadlines are an absolute joke. Perf ratings: just do a quick google about their perf ratings. Most of it is true. You’ll likely develop anxiety because of the rating system here. Poor professional practices: a new joiner would expect a solid onboarding period + any training if required. They attract talented people with good pay packages, but after that you’re on your own. Couple that with the points above and you’ll likely fail in your job or get crushed with a sea of documents and trying to find your way. Documentation by departments such as HR/ employee policies etc is good. But aside to that, within teams on R&Rs etc doesn’t exist. So good luck finding your way around!

Explore other reviews about TikTok

2.0
15 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay is level with industry and actual work is somewhat interesting depending on the team you're on

Cons

In my experience, career growth can feel very limited if you are not part of the dominant internal language and cultural network. A significant amount of important context, communication, and decision-making happens in Chinese, which can make non-Chinese-speaking employees feel excluded from key conversations and promotion opportunities. The environment did not feel as inclusive as it should be for a global company. Advancement often felt less tied to performance and more tied to whether you were connected to the right groups or able to operate fluently within the Chinese-speaking side of the organization. Over time, it felt like non-Chinese-speaking employees had fewer long-term career paths and were at risk of being replaced by people who could better fit that internal operating model. Things also move very slowly because employees are often given access only to the bare minimum needed to do their jobs. There is a heavy push toward using AI tools, but in practice it can make it harder to get help from real people. Instead of getting quick support, you often have to spend time going through AI bots or internal tools before getting a useful answer.

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