Toxic work environment, actively hostile towards employees - Anonymous employee TikTok Employee Review

1.0
Feb 25, 2021
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Fast growing company that's hiring quickly and moving into new areas.

Cons

* Old-school hierarchical structure where your place in the hierarchy determines everything and colleagues will decide how to treat you depending solely on where you sit in the reporting line. Claims to be flat, but the exact opposite. * Highly political: performance reviews determined completely by politics and manager favour rather than objective measures. Drawn out performance evaluation process for the illusion of fairness to then just have a manager decide how much they like you with no recourse. Colleagues rewarded for pleasing managers rather than doing objectively valuable work. * Zero consistency: everything changes every two months at the whim of leaders and you get told to drop everything and do something completely different. * Policies are designed to keep employees on a tight leash. Zero trust that would be considered standard at any other big tech company. No flexibility regarding work hours or location. Expect return to the office full-time as soon as possible with no changes from before while most other companies are offering at least some flexibility and our competitors in tech are offering lots of flexibility. * Zero work-life-balance, everyone is expected to work across timezones so expect meetings from 6am till well past midnight UK time and during weekends, holidays and PTO. * UK leadership doesn't engage with employees; solicit questions to then actively avoid answering them ("oh look, we've run out of time for questions" happens on every team call) and block any channels that might lead to feedback. Feedback (and certainly criticism) of management decisions is not tolerated. * Lots of dissatisfaction and mistrust with UK HR as many colleagues were misled about their roles, titles and levels during recruitment and accepted their roles based on false information. UK HR actively refuse to answer questions on levels, promotions, bonuses and compensation to hide this fact. * No compensation strategy: you're assigned a level but given no information about it (only the convenient excuse that they can't increase your salary because it's determined by your level) and the company doesn't have a known process for promotions, no standard salary increases, no standard equity increases and no clarity as to what bonus you will receive based on your performance review (or if you'll even receive the target bonus that you were told was guaranteed). * All the negative UK reviews here mention the same set of issues but negative survey results are swept under the rug with no plan or desire to fix problems that are obvious to anyone paying attention.

Explore other reviews about TikTok

5.0
May 11, 2026
Anonymous intern
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

good experience. Everyone is nice.

Cons

Pretty good actually. During internship did nor find any negative issues.

2.0
Jun 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay is level with industry and actual work is somewhat interesting depending on the team you're on

Cons

In my experience, career growth can feel very limited if you are not part of the dominant internal language and cultural network. A significant amount of important context, communication, and decision-making happens in Chinese, which can make non-Chinese-speaking employees feel excluded from key conversations and promotion opportunities. The environment did not feel as inclusive as it should be for a global company. Advancement often felt less tied to performance and more tied to whether you were connected to the right groups or able to operate fluently within the Chinese-speaking side of the organization. Over time, it felt like non-Chinese-speaking employees had fewer long-term career paths and were at risk of being replaced by people who could better fit that internal operating model. Things also move very slowly because employees are often given access only to the bare minimum needed to do their jobs. There is a heavy push toward using AI tools, but in practice it can make it harder to get help from real people. Instead of getting quick support, you often have to spend time going through AI bots or internal tools before getting a useful answer.

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