But according to interviews with current and former ByteDance employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for professional repercussions, the company was caught between the cultures it was trying to bridge. Workers say they were expected to work “996,” meaning 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — 72 hours — a standard schedule for Chinese tech companies. During this early expansion period, calls with overseas offices often ran until midnight and important meetings took place on Sundays. ByteStyle, the company’s code of values, preaches a culture that could have been extracted from Google or Amazon in a big way: diverse, inclusive, radically honest and transparent. But discussing salaries was “a line drawn in blood,” said a former employee, and speaking to the press was absolutely forbidden. The structure was flat, especially by Chinese standards: ByteDance did away with titles for senior positions and allowed all employees to access other employees’ stats, including Zhang’s. But it was still clear in which direction orders were flowing and managers were rarely questioned.
“ByteDance is run like a machine,” said one former employee. In China, the company is nicknamed the Super App Factory, in recognition of its streamlined system for pumping out new products. (By one count, ByteDance had more than 140 apps under its umbrella between 2018 and 2020.) Its high level of organization and systemization is one of the company’s strengths, as it allows rapid advancement and growth. But it can also be cold and inhumane. “Your goals get publicized and they carry with them the mantra that your colleagues are your competitors, not your friends,” the employee said. “It’s like a boiler room, a Wall Street boiler room.”
When the company’s international expansion began, all employees were instructed to learn English. Zhang was also learning, and he sometimes mentioned books he’d heard about “Speak English,” a popular ESL app, such as the Eckhart Tolle book “The Power of Now.” In 2020, ByteDance hired 40,000 new employees — an average of 150 per workday — many of them outside of China, and most of them under pandemic conditions. Some Chinese employees were amazed at the consequences of the expansion abroad. “Many Chinese employees may have been working for ByteDance for years and didn’t want to study English or talk to foreigners or change company values,” another former employee told me. “Many people in the Beijing office felt they were losing their business because of Yiming’s conquest of foreign markets.” Some Chinese employees were reportedly angry at how foreign employees described themselves as only working for TikTok in their LinkedIn profiles, with no mention of ByteDance.
The integration was also complicated for the foreign employees, especially those who came to ByteDance from senior positions at major US tech companies. Because they had been promised autonomy and independence, they found it difficult to accept that ultimate authority rested in Beijing. “America has been used to setting the standard and deciding business practice for so long, to being the home market and the headquarters, that it is not in the American psyche to be one of the regions,” said the second former employee. “The Americans are not used to not getting their way.”
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For the foreign employees at the headquarters in Beijing, the role of cultural translator was an unavoidable part of the job. When ByteDance tried to internationalize one of its short video products, the first ex-employee recalled, he was brought in for consultation. In China, the product was known as Xigua Shipin (“Watermelon Video”), and the internationalization team announced they had chosen a foreign name: “Ripe Melons.” He told them not to call it that. “They said, ‘Why?'” the former employee said. “I said, ‘Trust me, you can’t.’ They thought it was a great name. I said, “Melons are a slang word for women’s breasts.” They’re like, ‘No, it’s melons that are fresh.’” The product was eventually named BuzzVideo.
Gliding through cultures like a kind of Internet-era anthropologist was part of what made working at TikTok interesting and new. When the app was first introduced, each country and market had a slightly different inclination. Thai users liked videos of people dancing at school; Japanese users preferred funny videos over otaku, young people obsessed with anime, manga, and video games; Vietnamese users especially enjoyed dexterous camera work. The United States proved harder to crack, until TikTok’s product managers gave users the impetus to create a new category — Americans, it turned out, had an unusual attachment to memes.
But often ByteDance’s rapid foreign growth resulted in a strange hodgepodge. “TikTok’s culture is incredibly Chinese in a way that contradicts the advertising material, in a way that offends foreigners,” said the second former employee. “But on the other hand, it is a much more foreign technology company than most Chinese have ever worked for.” Both in Beijing and in the overseas offices, turnover was often high as employees burned out from working long hours, coordinating time zones and juggling cultures. But success eventually brought its own kind of stability. “It’s become a mainstream tech company — we’re getting people from Google, Facebook, Snapchat, consulting, blue-chip firms,” said one current US employee. “It no longer feels like a pariah Chinese company in any way.”
