Where did TikTok’s software engineers go?
Source: Pragmatic Engineer
The past six months has been something of a Doomsday scenario-esque countdown for TikTok, as the start date of its ban in the US crept ever closer. In the event, TikTok did indeed go offline for a few hours on 19 January, before President Trump gave the social network a stay of execution lasting 75 days.
How has this uncertainty affected software engineers at the Chinese-owned social network? According to data shared exclusively with The Pragmatic Engineer by Live Data Technologies, which tracks real-time live job change data across more than 160M professionals, this is how:
There’s been an outflow of engineers to:
- Big Tech: Meta, Google, Amazon (and AWS), Microsoft and Apple.
- Publicly traded tech companies: Snap, Pinterest, Snowflake, DoorDash, NVIDIA, Coinbase, Coupang, Salesforce, Uber
- Few private companies: X (formerly: Twitter) and OpenAI
It seems the uncertainty has motivated TikTok engineers to interview and quit when they get an offer. Still, I find it surprising that hardly any scaleups are popular destinations among TikTok leavers. To me, it indicates that people quit for better liquid total compensation packages; which may be why publicly traded companies are the most popular destination.
This was a short excerpt from The Pulse #123: Big Tech using its distribution advantage to win in AI?. You can read the full issue here.