[shwoopdiwoop]

>The company, which is one of the world’s most valuable private companies and owns several other buzzy apps in China, hired aggressively worldwide in the past several years as TikTok grew in popularity globally, especially during the pandemic. It employs more than 130,000 staff.

I cannot fathom how a social media app company would need this many employees to function.

[KeplerBoy]

How do you even put that number of people to productive work? I am fully aware that TikTok is vastly more complex than one might think at first, but that's an insane number.

[HomeDeLaPot]

>I cannot fathom how a social media app company would need this many employees to function.

I'm sure they're growing as fast as they can, for the sake of their investors and to outflank competitors.

You're probably just not familiar enough with TikTok. "Teens sharing short videos" is just the tip of the iceberg. It does video, like YouTube. It has livestreaming of events and gaming, like YouTube and Twitch. It has a music streaming app, like Spotify. It is an e-commerce platform with live video shopping, like... Facebook Live, I guess? It sells advertising space like Facebook does. I'm sure there's more. Disclaimer: I have never actually used TikTok myself.

[jjeaff]

and for all of those products, you have not just the engineers, you have QA, product managers, moderators, designers, a whole pyramid of HR, sales, accountants, data analysts, finance teams, legal, compliance, support staff for many of these positions as well as the need for duplication of many of these positions for each different country or region where the social media services are consumed.

[GauntletWizard]

Moderation in China is a hard business.

[0xfab1]

Still, they should've hired in moderation.

[gwern]

Hiring in moderation for Chinese moderation is a good way to meet an immoderate fate.

[3seashells]

C forbidden variable names: free HongKong?

Forbidden floats : square(Tieanmin) ?

TikTok coding convention: there is a toctic to this madness..