When Chinese software engineer Ben joined TikTok’s San Jose office in 2023, he felt as if he had entered a workplace back in his home country. All b

Despite international hires, TikTok is Chinese at its core

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2024-05-07 12:00:05

When Chinese software engineer Ben joined TikTok’s San Jose office in 2023, he felt as if he had entered a workplace back in his home country. All but a handful in his 100-strong team were Chinese nationals. Employees spoke in Mandarin and addressed each other as tong xue — an endearing term widely used in Chinese tech companies meaning “classmate.”

On his first day, Ben’s manager walked him through Lark, the proprietary work communication app of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok. He was surprised to find that the onboarding file and work messages on Lark were mostly in Chinese. “It was a reverse culture shock,” said Ben, who had previously worked at an American company and spoke to Rest of World under a pseudonym. “[TikTok] is more Chinese than what I’m used to.”

The 658,000-square-foot San Jose campus Ben works from is currently TikTok’s largest office in the U.S., with over 4,000 employees. The massive team was built in a mere two years. TikTok surged in popularity among American teenagers during the pandemic and now has 170 million U.S. users. Last year, ByteDance’s reported revenue nearly matched that of Meta, which would make it one of the world’s most lucrative internet technology companies. But in the U.S., TikTok has also been beset by allegations of potential censorship and data security breaches. Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that would push ByteDance to sell the app within 270 days, or leave the country. TikTok has pledged to challenge the law.