ByteDance Sr. Software Engineer reviews

Not a lot for me, but occasionally people need to travel back outside of US to cooperate with other team, which might not be friendly enough for people with young kids. Also knowing some mandarine is very necessary for engineering teams. Work life balance is ok, but sometimes there could be meetings, mostly before 9pm.

- PMs and managers have insane expectations for delivery times and quantity of work - Due to this, you are expected to work basically every evening, late at night, and often over the weekend - Meetings with teammates in China are always China time, so nearly every evening is filled with meetings, meaning even without insane work expectations you are expected to work 10am-10pm 7 days a week just for meetings - If you are not Chinese, all your coworkers will look down on you and you will be constantly treated as lesser and subject to increased scrutiny for everything you do, and it will be extremely obvious in many cases. I am the only member of my team that is required to have my code reviewed, for example - Similarly, if you don't speak and read Chinese you need to use autotranslate for nearly everything, including tons of important documentation that doesn't really translate well from such disparate languages. Most meetings will also be held in Chinese, meaning you will rely on both voice recognition and autotranslate for hour+ long meetings that are mandatory. - About 1/3 of the 'total compensation' for the position is in bonus and stock. The bonus is performance based so they'll pay you as little as they want and the stock is useless because ByteDance isn't a publicly traded company yet so you can only sell back to the company for a fraction of the value