Throwaway account for obvious reason.
I’m considering 2 roughly comparable offers from Indeed and ByteDance. At least from the interviews, I feel both companies are good places to work.
For people who have worked in at least one of those two, could you let me know your experience?
8 comments
friend interned for ByteDance Japan and said it was a semi-meatgrinder, long working hours and mainly operations rather than development (correspondence with creators, marketing and selling the platform)
another friend works for ByteDance Indonesia and said under the hood its culture is boringly corporate
I applied to Indeed and they rejected me pretty harshly after an interview process where they’d lead me up the garden path. Felt like a real mask coming off thing after they’d been doing so much performative niceness through the whole process (e.g. they said during the application that they were going to send a gift whatever happened, and then didn’t, lol).
Definitely more Recruiters trying to suggest Bytedance.
Don’t work for TikTok
Full disclosure: I was an advisor (on technology) for many who invested in ByteDance back in 2018. I have built gaze estimation, video encoding, and video de duplication software that’s used/were used in ByteDance produced products.
Both indeed and ByteDance are okay companies to work at. Depending on what your role is, it could be fulfilling or soul sucking. If compensation is your goal then both of these companies pay competitive wages and very few tech companies match or exceed that comp.
ByteDance’s main product is Douyin (or TikTok outside China). Its just a outlet for ByteDance’s computer vision research team to test their inventions. So if you are still involved in development of their video products then chances for challenging work is pretty slim.
My personal opinion: pick the offer that puts you in a role thats not related to a or in a cost center. A cost center is team or business unit that does not create revenue. I constantly worked in research and growth teams that didn’t have financial goals and as a result I was making far less money than my friends that worked in sales/engineering roles.
According to one Chinese saying, byte and heart, only one can dance. It is a sarcastic way to depict ByteDance’s work culture where if the company dances to make money, your heart will have to stop dancing (beating) due to overwork.
Bytedance is owned by the Chinese communist party, which owns a cyberwarfare division currently engaged in espionage (and collection of child pornography) worldwide.
That division is called TikTok.
Do not work for CCP companies. To not use CCP products. Do put yourself in a situation where you must rely on the CCP to obey the law. Do not support the CCP in any way.
ByteDance is sus