But according to interviews with current and former ByteDance employees, who asked not to be named out of concern for professional consequences, the company is caught between the very cultures it is trying to bridge. Employees say they need “996” work, which runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — 72 hours — the standard schedule for Chinese tech companies. In the early days of the expansion, calls with overseas offices often lasted until midnight, and important meetings took place on Sundays. The company’s values, ByteStyle, promote a culture that could be lifted across the board from Google or Amazon: diversity, inclusion, extreme honesty, and transparency. But discussing salary is “a bloodline,” one former employee said, and talking to the media is strictly forbidden. The structure is flat, especially by Chinese standards — ByteDance removed the titles of senior positions and gave all employees access to other employees’ metrics, including Zhang’s. But the direction of the order flow remains clear and managers are rarely questioned.
“ByteDance operates like a machine,” said a former employee. In China, the company is nicknamed Super App Factory in recognition of its streamlined system for launching new products. (ByteDance has more than 140 applications between 2018 and 2020, according to statistics.) A high level of organization and systematization is one of the company’s strengths, as it allows rapid progress and growth. But it can also be cruel and inhuman. “Your goals are public, and the mantra they instill is 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 started to expand internationally, all employees were told to learn English. Zhang, who is also studying, sometimes refers to books he’s listened to on Speak English, a popular ESL app, such as Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now.” In 2020, ByteDance hired 40,000 new workers — an average of 150 per workday — many of whom were outside China, and most of them in the context of the pandemic. Some Chinese employees are angry about the consequences of overseas expansion. “Many Chinese employees may have been working at ByteDance for years, and they don’t want to start learning English or talking to foreigners or changing company values,” another former employee told me. “For a lot of people in the Beijing office, they felt like they were losing the company because Yiming conquered foreign markets.” Some Chinese employees reportedly complained to foreign employees that they only work for TikTok and not on their LinkedIn profiles. Disturbed by the way ByteDance was mentioned.
The integration is also complicated for foreign employees — especially those who come to ByteDance from senior positions at big U.S. tech companies. After being promised autonomy and independence, they found it difficult to accept that ultimate power rested in Beijing’s hands. “The U.S. has been used for so long as the standard-setter and arbiter of business practices, the home market and headquarters, that it’s not one of the regions in the American mind,” said a second former employee. “Americans are not used to not getting their own way.”
Things we consider before using anonymous sources. Does the source know this information? What motives do they tell us? Have they proven reliable in the past? Can we corroborate this information? Even after addressing these concerns, The Times used anonymous sources as a last resort. Reporters and at least one editor knew the identities of the sources.
For foreign employees in the Beijing headquarters, the role of cultural translation is an inevitable part of the job. The first former employee recalled being called in for a consultation when ByteDance was trying to internationalize one of its short-video products. In China, the product is called Xigua Shipin (“Xigua Video”), and the internationalization team announced that they have chosen an overseas name: “Ripe Melons”. He told them they couldn’t 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, ‘Melo is slang for a woman’s breast.’ ’ They were like, ‘No, it’s fresh watermelon.’” The product was eventually named BuzzVideo.
As an anthropologist for the internet age, crossing cultures is part of what makes working at TikTok fun and new. When the app was first launched, each country and each market had slightly different preferences.Thai users like videos of people dancing at school; Japanese users prefer videos about Otaku, young people obsessed with anime, manga, and video games; Vietnamese users especially appreciate deft camera work. The US proved harder to crack, until TikTok’s product managers gave users a push to create a new category — and Americans, it turns out, have an unusual attachment to memes.
But more often than not, ByteDance’s rapid growth abroad leads to an odd mashup. “The culture of TikTok is very Chinese, contrary to the advertising material, which somehow offends foreigners,” said a second former employee. “But on the other hand, it looks more like a foreign technology company than what most Chinese people have worked for before.” In Beijing and foreign offices, turnover is often high as employees work long hours, Exhausting from coordinating across time zones and cultural juggling. But success ultimately brings its own stability. “It’s become a mainstream tech company — we’re hiring from Google, Facebook, Snapchat, consultancies and blue chips,” says a current U.S. employee. “It doesn’t feel like an abandoned Chinese company anymore.”
