What it’s really like working at TikTok
On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would force ByteDance, the Chinese company who owns TikTok, to sell the app or get banned in the U.S. If they sell, a Western-owned TikTok may need to redevelop the app’s recommendation algorithm (arguably its secret sauce). TikTok creators, who can earn anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over $10K for a sponsored video, are descending on Washington, DC to protest. The bill passed in a sweeping 352–65 vote; evidently, a majority of Congresspeople fear China may use TikTok to spy on Americans or influence elections. A poll last year from Pew reveals that most U.S. citizens share those fears.
For some first-hand insight into what it’s like inside the company, I revisited this Medium series from former TikTok product manager Melody Chu.
Friends would often ask Chu: Does TikTok feel like a Chinese company or a Silicon Valley company? Her answer: “TikTok operates more like a Chinese company with some Silicon Valley influence — not the other way around.” Chu explains that Tiktok’s access to Chinese talent means it’s not constrained by anything except its own ambitions:
I quickly found out that that prioritization is not a core pillar of planning at Bytedance. And the key lay in the fact that we were rarely ever people constrained […] Oftentimes, if our teams couldn’t hire talent quickly enough in the US, the leaders would turn to filling those roles in China so there weren’t any significant, extended gaps in staffing. Not to mention, people in China work a lot more than people in the US, and that culture permeated to us in the US as well.
Chu describes working “996” (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), apparently the norm inside TikTok (which crossed 1 billion users in 2021). There’s another interesting section here, where Chu claims that “Bytedance takes some wildly different approaches from what social media behemoths like Facebook take in the US & Western markets.” Specifically, their “closed loop” approach means they do not share data with third parties, unlike many American social media mainstays (e.g. Facebook) who share data via APIs.
Read Chu’s full series for more.
— Harris @ Medium
What else we’re reading
In 2021, L.A. resident Michael Schneider was fed up with how hard it can be to walk around his city. (L.A.’s pedestrian fatality rate is almost 25% higher than the national average.) So, Schneider embarked on a three-year odyssey to pass a ballot measure that would require safer bike and bus lines. After a journey involving petitions, YouTube campaigns, and menacing billboards created by his political rivals, the measure passed last Tuesday.
If you want to create a campaign that moves people, Schneider advises, do the comms yourself: “We hired our own creative team, did our own branding and commercials, did our own social media, and ran our own ads online and on television. As a result, we were extremely quick on our feet, we saved money, and we were able to react to whatever came our way nearly instantly.”
Also: Denilson Nastacio, a software developer at IBM, catalogs three types of employees in any company (borrowed from British researcher Simon Wardley). We’re all a mix of these:
- Pioneers jump on rare opportunities in highly ambiguous problem spaces. Risks and rewards run high. Core skill: Imagination.
- Settlers stabilize growing areas of the business. They capitalize on what shows potential. Core skill: Building trust.
- Town planners double-down on what’s working. They focus on efficiency and scale. Core skill: Managing resources.
The takeaway here, no matter which type you are: “If something doesn’t exist, create it. If it exists and is valuable, build upon it. If something works, keep doing it, but keep looking for the next thing.”
From the archive: Ireland’s anti-slavery history
Limerick-based librarian and historian Liam Hogan chronicles Ireland’s thousand-plus-year history of protesting slavery, beginning with St. Patrick himself. At age 16, the future Saint then known as Patricius (son of a tax collector in Wales) was kidnapped by Irish pirates and held captive for six years. After his escape, Hogan explains, Patricius “sent a now-famous letter to the Romano-British warlord Caroticus. In this letter, Patricius condemned and excommunicated the soldiers of Coroticus for enslaving his new Christian converts in Ireland and for selling them to non-Christians. This document is one of the earliest anti-slavery texts in existence.”
Your daily dose of practical wisdom about starting from zero
Cultivate what the Zen Buddhists call shoshin, or “beginner’s mind.” Author Quentin Septer says “it is an antidote to ignorance, a remedy for arrogance.”
And…
Congratulations to reader Jeandhanlon, who was the first to answer yesterday’s question about why Pi Approximation Day is celebrated on the 22nd of July: In countries with the day-month-year format the date is written 22/7, which is a fractional approximation of pi. Congrats Jean, and enjoy six free months of Medium membership!
Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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