Behind the Scenes: Tales from TikTok's China offices

A deeply beloved and incredibly big tech company.

Correction: TikTok doesn’t have offices in China.

ByteDance does. (Apologies – a girl’s gotta SEO.)

And for ByteDance, TikTok is just one of several products: There’s Lark, ByteDance’s office suite (basically a version of Google Docs, Slack, Zoom, and more all integrated into one and so user-friendly that it’s actually one of the things I miss most from my time at TikTok). There’s Pico, a VR company. There’s various other business endeavors. And then, there’s Douyin, the OG TikTok. Of course.

The ByteDance offices were surprising for me. There I was, thinking I had joined this scrappy start up that people still mistook for musical.ly, but in reality I had joined a big tech company with thousands of employees and colleagues. I had just started little over a month before I was sent to Shanghai and Beijing, so everything was new and exciting to me. It didn’t hit me until I entered the office building in Shanghai just how big of a corporation ByteDance really was (and is) though. There was even a gift shop with merchandise from their different product lines, with employees and guests shopping happily!

The ByteDance office in Shanghai, 2019. ByteDance has since moved offices.