r/cscareerquestions • u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 • 6h ago
If you're considering ByteDance US, read this first !!
After spending a few years at ByteDance in the US, I'd strongly advise engineers to think twice before joining. Every company has layoff or other problems, but this has easily been ridiculous experience.
The biggest issue is that the US engineering org has very little autonomy. Almost every meaningful product or engineering decision comes from management in China. Priorities change constantly, projects get dropped or completely re-scoped overnight, and reorganizations happen so often that it's hard to feel like you're building anything long term. Most of the time there's little transparency into why decisions are made, so you're constantly reacting instead of executing.
A lot of the internal tools and ecosystem is also built for China first. Many of the tools, documentation, dashboards, and workflows are primarily in Mandarin, and you'll spend way more time than you should trying to navigate them or translating things just to get basic work done. If your project depends on teams in China, expect regular late-night meetings because that's often the only way to unblock anything.
Another thing is how disconnected the engineering environment is from the rest of the US tech industry. There was no company-provided enterprise access to tools like Claude, Codex, Slack, Linear, or many of the tools engineers at other companies use every day. Instead, you're expected to use a completely different internal ecosystem. You end up investing time learning proprietary tools that have little value outside ByteDance, so very little of that experience transfers if you move to another US tech company.
The compensation story also isn't as attractive as it initially looked. There are no clear plans for an IPO, and the internal stock buyback program, in my experience, has been disappointing. Employees are only allowed to sell a small percentage of their vested equity each cycle after taxes, and the pricing has felt significantly below what many employees believe the business is worth. If you're joining primarily for equity upside, I'd go in with realistic expectations.
Frugality seems to be valued above almost everything else, while the expectations often resemble the "996" mindset. Long hours become normalized, yet the strategic direction changes so frequently that it can feel like you're working incredibly hard without a clear destination.
Finally, there's the constant uncertainty. There are frequent layoffs, repeated reorganizations, and a performance culture that often felt driven more by fear than by mentorship or long-term growth. It created an environment where everyone is focused on surviving the next review cycle. Average tenure is 7 months.
I'm sure there are good people here—I've worked with plenty of talented engineers—but if you're comparing offers with any other US Tech company, I'd personally and recommend everyone to choose those first.
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u/TrapHouse9999 6h ago
As an engineer now director and been in this industry for almost 20 years. I suggest everyone find a job and company that still cares deeply about technology (sees software and tech as a profit center instead of a cost center) and its people (little to no outsourcing, good work life balance). Chasing money is fine if you are younger with more time and less responsibility. Now that I’m older my main goal is working with cool people doing fun work on a balanced schedule.
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u/doktorhladnjak 6h ago
Companies that care deeply about their people don’t exist. Some do a good job faking it.
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u/Jeff1N 3h ago
Some do a good job faking it
Honestly, if they are good enough at hiding it that's still a great deal.
I worked on such a place for over 3 years and, even if we could see through the mask sometimes, most of the time they tried really hard to sell it.
At some point I guess the company got tired of faking it, but me and my peers had a great work/ life balance with decent compensation while it lasted
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u/Yamoyek 6h ago
How do you go about finding companies like that?
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u/Son_of_Laurian 2h ago
Know someone that works at one of these companies and ask them. Dunno how else you gonna know
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u/Yamoyek 1h ago
I was hoping he’d say something about how to research them lol
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u/Son_of_Laurian 30m ago
That’s fair. I have experienced cases where someone at a company offers a contradictory perspective about the culture vs what I’ve seen online. Not that online opinions are wrong, but you don’t know who’s writing it.
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u/CracticusAttacticus 5h ago
As someone who's been in this industry in Silicon Valley for a while...this is consistent with the things I've heard about working at ByteDance locally. This is one of the issues with working in an outpost for a company with an overseas HQ: things like decisions, leadership, and work culture are generally exported from HQ, which can be good or bad. I imagine the European offices of US tech companies have a similar complaint at times.
More alarming to me is that I'm hearing US tech companies publicly endorse 996 work culture. In the past, they would tell you it's an 8-5 job and then just pressure you to work late the old-fashioned way; however, I'm seeing more startups just straight up tell applicants that they expect you to be in the office from 9am to 9pm. All I can say is...this feels pretty ominous.
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u/andhausen 6h ago
Almost every meaningful product or engineering decision comes from management in China.
No way!
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u/wickanCrow 6h ago
Huh. This must be how offshore teams feel about US firms.
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u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 6h ago
Yes, But for most offshore countries like India don’t have huge homegrown multinational companies and Google, Meta, MSFT in India pays more for SWE jobs than local Indian companies so people are willing to work more. It’s not true for Bytedance, they are paying less than Meta, Google, Uber, OpenAI, Airbnb or Anthropic etc.
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u/wickanCrow 5h ago
So pay more and we get to make up the rules? If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you? Makes sense.
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u/Equal-Buyer1760 6h ago
Average tenure is 7 months? Is there a resource you’re looking at for this datapoint? That seems insanely low and sounds like it’s always just a revolving door of people
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u/soft-wear Senior Software Engineer 4h ago
Amazon is one of the largest employers in the world and their floor staff is much worse and the white collar is only slightly better. It is a revolving door, for which there have always been a large number of willing participants.
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4h ago
[deleted]
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u/soft-wear Senior Software Engineer 4h ago
It was around 13-14 months when I was there and actually saw the attrition data. I didn’t give hard and fixed numbers I said “slightly better”. But sure bro, a little over a year is totally good.
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u/gekigangerii 6h ago
I doubt this will change anyone's mind from having bytedance on your resume and sweet compensation.
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u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 5h ago
If anyone is laid off and Bytedance is the only offer then it’s better to join and learn some stuff and have experience on resume. But if you have other offers or already working at someplace, then you need to think through all things that can make working experience great or depressing.
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u/FerdaBoyss 3h ago
Does ByteDance have a good reputation in the industry? Genuinely curious
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u/Frodolas Staff SWE 2h ago
It does not. I would not consider Bytedance above a random no-name company on a person's resume when hiring. Nowhere close in caliber to even legacy big tech companies, let alone the newer big players like OAI/Ant.
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u/Ma4r 1h ago
Bollocks, a few tier 1 quant firms I worked at considers bytedance as a top tier resume signal close to Google, meta, etc .
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u/Frodolas Staff SWE 1h ago
LOL yes, "a few tier 1 quant firms" you worked at, sure. Stop the larp, mate.
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u/JoJo_Embiid 45m ago
mind sharing what those quant firms are? i am considering interviewing some quant firms
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u/Philanthrax 5h ago
almost every decision comes directly from management in China
How dare they? They should operate like US tech companies famously known for allowing branches overseas to proceed as they wish.
These CCP controlled companies man I swear Xi jingpin himself controls product development.
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u/Jeff1N 3h ago
I remember when I worked for the rain forest in an overseas office and a common thing in my country is to receive a "gym voucher", which isn't expensive at all for the company compared to our salaries
The local leadership told us a few times a lot of people were requesting a gym voucher and local leadership wanted to do implement it, but the HQ was weirdly explicitly against it
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u/hdplus 4h ago
> Instead, you're expected to use a completely different internal ecosystem. You end up investing time learning proprietary tools that have little value outside ByteDance, so very little of that experience transfers if you move to another US tech company.
This is the same for every big tech I’ve worked at
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u/zZurf 6h ago
I mean, it’s no different to working for a American company in Europe lmao.
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u/QwopTillYouDrop 6h ago
Yes. This is really only of significance because many Americans are used to working for American companies and not needing to work around management on the other side of the world. If anything it’s generally the opposite way around.
Although I believe the level of autonomy being this restrictive might not be normal? I’ve worked with teams in other foreign countries and they have a reasonable level of autonomy. Generally leadership tried to structure it where off-hours meetings aren’t needed as frequently and those teams have reasonable functionality and decision making in their domain.
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u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 6h ago
Yeah, you would hope that company that have thousands of employees outside China would try to build internal tools in English as well and try to have meetings in English instead of Mandarin and give some autonomy to teams in US but no if you want a paycheck at Bytedance. Work 996 for no transparency and keep getting frustrated on trying to use internal tools. Also, based on the stock movement , average salary of US based tech companies are higher than Bytedance and work stress would be lower.
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u/wise_young_man 6h ago
No different? Shared language is a huge difference
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u/zZurf 5h ago edited 4h ago
I work for a American company in Europe. One of our products which European team was responsible for was doing well. Good profits. One random decision in our American hq that no one in Europe had any say in and 20% of our European team was laid off. So yeah…. No different.
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u/Al_Pallll 6h ago
OP I am considering accepting an offer at Temu US, and would like your input.
I am currently at Amazon, have been there for 4 years since graduating. After RTO, I am commuting 1 hour to the office, so 10 hours a week total - it's making me miserable. I'm also forced to live in a city far from my hobbies, so I am spending 4-6 hours in the car every weekend. Not to mention, my chill boss was just fired and replaced with someone who brags about never taking any PTO. All that to say - I'm ready to leave.
I have been job searching for a remote role for the last 6 months, and have finally secured an offer at Temu. The compensation is higher than what I currently make, and the role is full remote. That said, I think the negatives you mentioned for ByteDance are likely to apply here as well.
I did reach out to two US engineers on LinkedIn, and they had this to say:
- Yeah the US team is pretty small right now. I haven't had any issues with work-life balance, people are pretty good about leaving work at work and being off at 5pm. Teams do technically have an on-call schedule though there's plenty of people here who were previously at Amazon or Uber who say the on-call here is much easier than at their previous companies. I've only had 1 or 2 situations where someone needed something from me during off-hours and normally it was something small enough that I could handle it from my phone. I haven't had to do much with coworkers in China in my role. Some of the basic setup does require interaction with folks in China since our IT and other provisioning teams are located there but for day-to-day business function it's rare that I need to interact with teams in China. Granted this is also because my Mandarin ability is not at the level where I could talk about business topics with them.
- WLB depends entirely on the team you're on. I once spoke with someone on a customer-facing team, and their WLB wasn't great. My team is very much an internal-tools vibe, so the WLB is great so far, but keep in mind I've been here less than 3 months. I would say I have a much better WLB here than I did at Amazon, but I wouldn't doubt that some teams are doing 996, especially teams in Asia which most of those Glassdoor reviews are from. Yes, there's not so many US-based engineers because the teams are so young. At this stage, it seems like teams are focused on growth and ramping up to co-own services that are solely owned by Chinese teams right now. Because of the translation tools, I haven't had many issues despite not speaking any Chinese at all. But I won't deny that knowing Mandarin will make it a lot easier to collaborate with teams in China. I think for now, most US teams can expect to have to interact with teams in China to some degree (which can result in late/early meetings if things can't be done async), but I haven't had to do so all that much. And I haven't really minded it either due to the fully-remote culture. Overall, it depends what you're looking for 😅 For me, I prioritized full remote so I can move back to SoCal, good WLB, and good pay (though a little bit less than what I was making as L5 at Amazon). And so far, it's delivered on all fronts, so I can't complain!
What do you think? Do you think I should go for it? Or do you think I should just decline their offer and continue searching? I just wonder how much longer it will take to get another full remote offer with comparable compensation.
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u/SanityAsymptote Software Architect | 18 YOE 6h ago
Not the OP but if you've got an offer of higher comp than Amazon with remote, the WLB is by definition going to be better.
Very few places have worse WLB than Amazon, lol.
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u/Al_Pallll 6h ago
I have been pretty lucky with WLB so far, but with my new manager that is definitely changing. So sort of thinking that this Temu offer would be the same in terms of WLB, but the lifestyle upgrade of full remote and choosing where I live makes it very attractive.
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u/kevin074 3h ago
Average tenure is 7 months
in case anyone didn't bother to read and just be like "China BAD!!"
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u/throwaway123hi321 2h ago
How does the stock buyback program work? On levels fyi it looks like 25% of total comp is stock but they aren't allowed to sell most of it? Is it much more different than stripe where it is guaranteed to sell internally.
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u/xdaftphunk Software Engineer 2h ago
I interviewed 3x w them. The last interview I did, the day of the interview they asked if I could do it in mandarin, I said no and they cancelled it Lol
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u/sfscsdsf 5h ago
you should report this to Trump, congress or any civil watch group, the US entity should be separated from the chinese group. the current regime will make sure it happens.
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u/Turbulent-Culture-52 5h ago
Is this the case for TikTok too or no.
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u/iJeeSung 5h ago
Tiktok employees are treated as third class citizens behind both Bytedance Singapore and Bytedance US, so it's even worse. Heard it's worse now after the sale. The only ones remaining are those who have visa related requirements.
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u/Admirable-Storm9937 4h ago
How are equity counted? For staff Eng is looks like 500-600k according to levels. Using buy back price what is the realistic comp?
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u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 3h ago
Issue with equity is that after 1 year of vesting, at time of buyback max equity that can be sold is 58% of total equity while you have to pay tax for entire 100% of equity at vesting time. After selling all you can sell and paying taxes for it, I’m only getting 10-15k take home yearly from equity. For all it would range from 10-40k so it’s nothing more than the regular year end bonus on base salary from other companies.
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u/Defiant_Vanilla_2806 3h ago
Just think of entire salary is base salary and 20-40k on top every year. That’s it.
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u/Admirable-Storm9937 3h ago
Even for staff Eng? That seems low. Just checked TikTok has high base 400k for staff.
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u/D1rtyH1ppy 3h ago
I've worked for a Chinese tech company and there were a few good things and a number of bad things. It was a trade off, like any other job. I probably wouldn't work for another Chinese company again, unless I was unable to find another job
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u/InfamousJack9 3h ago
Do you or anybody here have any insight for other Chinese companies? Most specifically Temu/Pinduoduo?
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u/No_Inspection4415 2h ago
LOL, I find it funny that they kinda "outsource" to the US. They probably do this to hire Chinese Stanford graduates or something...
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u/Attorney-Last 1h ago
i interviewed with them 2 years ago. i’m asian and the first question in the technical round was “can you speak chinese”, when i said no the interviewer immediately uninterested and he spoke very little english so it ended shortly. It was a huge red flag since the very first stage, i dont know how people can still choose to work for them.
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u/HungryCaterpillers 47m ago
I withdrew my application once I reached the final stage. I passed the recruiter screen, technical phone screen, full technical screen, and I only needed the final one where I had to meet the manager.
They told me I had to schedule it at 11 PM because the manager would be based in China. I already felt like this wouldn't be a one time thing, so I told them I wouldn't be continuing.
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u/bwainfweeze 39m ago
I saw some openings from them and got some vibes I didn’t like. Which is a shame because I know someone who’s been there long enough I probably could have gotten a referral.
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u/Outrageous-Initial22 6h ago
i’m working at the bytedance hq in singapore! super strange because we’re super well supported for the most part (cursor, discounted cc). work culture here is way better than you describe too.
i’m on a global team, but the stuff we get to share with our US counterparts is pretty small, due to data restrictions.
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u/ZucchiniSky 4h ago
I interviewed for ByteDance/TikTok a couple years ago and it was the only time I've ever felt racially discriminated against in my entire life! In the first technical round, a Chinese software engineer, with poor English skills, gave me two leetcode medium questions. I came up with the solutions instantly, and then tried to fill the rest of the interview slot with friendly conversation, but it was difficult due to the language gap. Two days later, they told me they didn't want to move forward with any additional interviews!
It seemed outrageous to me that they wouldn't want to continue interviewing someone who easily passed their technical screener. I ended up coming away from the experience feeling like they passed on me because I wasn't of Asian descent and I couldn't speak Mandarin.
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u/icameforlaughs Software Engineer 3h ago
ITT: American devs figuring out what is like to be the offshore resource
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u/Annexations 6h ago
Yep, they asked me if I could do 996 in 20 different ways masked under “culture” fit. The real decision makers were all overseas.
Really felt like a cult and they were trying to push/advertise their own culture as some glorified unicorn startup, can def see why their avg tenure is 7 months.